Typically, it's caused by an infection, allergies, a deviated septum, or nasal polyps and can affect both adults and children. Chronic sinusitis often makes it difficult to breathe through your nose while lying down. It can also make the area around your eyes and cheeks feel swollen and tender.
Why Can't I Breathe Through my Nose at Night? Mucosal obstruction: Nasal allergies, sinus infections, and the common cold can all cause the linings of your nose and sinus to swell and make breathing at night difficult.
People who breathe through their mouth and not their nose are more likely to develop sleep disorders, including sleep apnea. Children who have mouth breathing are more likely to have dental problems like malocclusion and facial differences.
While most people breathe through their nose during sleep, people may sleep with their mouths open for a variety of reasons. Sleeping with the mouth open may be a temporary response to nasal congestion, a learned habit, or a symptom of an underlying health condition.
Breathing through your mouth at night puts you at higher risk for sleep disorders including snoring, sleep apnea and hypopnea, the partial blockage of air, scientists have found. Each of those, in turn, can lead to daytime fatigue.
Mouth breathing is surprisingly more common than you think. In a Sleep Review study, 61% of adults surveyed identified themselves as a mouth breather. That's an awful lot of adults struggling to get a breath through their nose.
Sleeping with your mouth open may not seem like a big deal, but it's a major red flag that you're not breathing properly at night, which can have a severe negative impact on your overall health and wellness. In fact, chronic mouth breathing is one of the primary symptoms of sleep apnea.
Causes of Mouth-Breathing
There are two primary reasons for mouth-breathing during sleep. The first is that there may be an issue with or blockage in your nasal airway, such as a deviated septum and congestion. The second is simply due to bad habits.
Common causes of mouth breathing include: Nasal blockages causes by cold, flu or allergies. Deviated septum or the cartilage divider between the nostrils is abnormal making it difficult to breath through the nose.
A solid routine will impact your facial structure
If you are a nose breather, the tongue creates a good definition of cheekbones and a wider face through force exerted against your jaw. Tongues of mouth breathers have nowhere to rest resulting in facial structure changes as time goes on.
As an adult, the growth and development has already happened but it's not too late–there are MANY health benefits to breathing through your nose instead of your mouth at any age!
Long term mouth breathing can lead to a myriad of oral issues including crowded teeth, cracked lips, caries (or cavities), gum disease and more. But the issues don't stop at the mouth. Mouth breathers are also more likely to experience digestive issues, chronic fatigue, morning headaches and sore throat.
According to the survey data, 71% of beds across America are host to a mouth breather. The most common signs of mouth breathing reported were being awoken by nighttime nasal congestion (75%) waking up with a dry mouth (61%), and snoring (37%).
Conclusion: All subjects with mouth-breathing habit exhibited a significant increase in lower incisor proclination, lip incompetency and convex facial profile. The presence of adenoids accentuated the facial convexity and mentolabial sulcus depth.
Facial structure: mouth-breathing can actually lead the bones of the face to develop differently, yielding flat features, drooping eyes, a narrow jaw and dental arch, and a small chin, gummy smiles, dental malocclusion, including a large overbite and crowded teeth, poor posture.
If you breathe through your mouth and breathe hard, there's less oxygen delivery to the cells.” This makes us more prone to high blood pressure, anxiety, stress, depression, sleep-disordered breathing, asthma and fatigue.
Breathing through your nose has long been considered superior to breathing through your mouth. 'Mouth-breather' has been used as an insult for a stupid person since at least 1915, and people who do it are sometimes said to be unattractive.
“More than half of the people diagnosed with ADHD are mouth breathers. That is too significant a statistic to be a coincidence.” Understanding the connecting between mouth breathing and ADHD can help your child get the treatment they need.
People who breathe through the mouth also may experience greater cravings for sugary, fatty, starchy foods—all of which can lead to weight gain. Breathing through the mouth also can affect the way you sleep.
Nose breathing allows our faces to develop normally – and there's research to support this. Breathing through your mouth may change your face shape as the jaw is constantly open, rather than closed as it naturally should be.