Ep 684 | Shut Your Mouth (and Sleep Better)

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Today is going to be a fun episode. They're all fun, but especially today, we're going to talk a little, little bit about health and one health hack that I leverage that certainly will be strange for many of you to hear, but I promise you it works. Please hear me out today. Again, a little bit different an episode, but I get asked these questions about, you know, these various things that, that I do, and I, I like to test everything. Some of them work, some of them, you know, don't necessarily, but this one specific thing has actually made a significant impact on me personally and on my sleep especially. It sounds ridiculous at first, but here it is. Tape your mouth before you go to bed. Tape it shut before you go to bed. Now, if you didn't know better, you think it was some sort of like TikTok stunt. But it's not. It's mouth taping. And I think it's become one of the simplest, most effective sleep performance tools out there. And I actually have some data behind it for me personally that indicates such. You might spend hundreds, if not thousands, on supplements or mattresses or different sleep trackers. But the truth is, if you're breathing wrong while you sleep, a lot of that stuff just doesn't matter. So let's back up. What do I mean when I say mouth taping? Okay. Taping your mouth is exactly what it sounds like, using, using some sort of breathable tape. I use a very specific tape. This name is terrible, but I use a brand called Hostage Tape. You can Google it and find it. And they just come in strips. And frankly, I probably pay a little bit more for this Hostage Tape. You could probably get a like effect using something similar, just the way it comes packaged. It just makes it easier for me. I pay for the efficiency of the tape. But of creating the tape, but you could use any gentle, like, breathable tape, usually a tape that's designed for skin. And you use this tape to keep your lips closed while you sleep. You're not totally sealing your mouth shut. You're just really encouraging your body to breathe through your nose and not your mouth. Now, this concept has been popularized by lots of health experts, the one that I think first told me about it was, was Dr. Andrew Huberman. And their research has shown that how you breathe fundamentally affects or impacts how you sleep and how you recover, and even how you think, believe it or not. Dr. Huberman explained, as has explained many a time, that mouth breathing is actually a problem. When you sleep with your mouth open, several things happen physiologically. First, you lose about 40 up to 50% more moisture from your airways, drying out your throat and drying out your mouth. You reduce nitric oxide production, which is a molecule made in the nasal, nasal cavity that improves oxygen uptake, and thereby improve, improving blood flow and even immune function. And then you also activate the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight state, instead of what you want when you're sleeping, the parasympathetic state that your body needs to rest and recover. Lastly, when you're breathing through your mouth with your mouth open, you increase your risk of snoring and poor REM sleep, sleep apnea. And that's because your airway collapses more easily when your mouth is open. So in short, the science says that mouth breathing stresses your system all night long. Nasal breathing, the opposite here, is, is superior. It has an opposite effect. It's nature's built-in filtration, your nasal breathing, and your— and nature's, uh, natural regulation system. The nose warms and, and humidifies air before it hits your lungs. It filters bacteria and it filters allergens. It increases NO, nitric oxide, levels, which helps your blood carry oxygen more efficiently. And ultimately, it slows your breathing. And that— it does that by extending your exhale, and it triggers this calm nervous system response. So it's, it's literally the opposite of what I just gave you. And it's why I think elite athletes, endurance athletes, professional athletes, it's why they train themselves to nasal breathe even during hard exertion. If you were an athlete or an athlete today, you probably have heard many times, breathe through your nose, breathe through your nose. Well, that's during exercise. Why not be doing that same thing while you're sleeping? It improves endurance and improves oxygen efficiency, and ultimately it impacts your focus. So at night, nasal breathing stabilizes your sleep cycles and prevents dehydration, and it improves your heart rate variability, your HRV. Now, I'm going to pause here because as I've been leveraging mouth tape for— gosh, I don't even know how long now. It's got to be at least a year plus, maybe closer to 2 years. I track all my numbers. I know what my HRV is. I know what my REM sleep is. And, and I know my state of stress or lack of stress during the night. And I could show you data before I use mouth tape and after. And by the way, it's not massive. It's not massive, but like the changes, but there are changes. And equally, if not more important to me, I'm not— I don't snore now. I don't know if I ever really did. My wife would tell you I do. But I certainly don't now. My mouth is not dry when I wake up. From time to time, I'd have a sore throat. No longer. And I can tell, I can actually feel this difference in the morning. Now, mouth taping doesn't force you to breathe through your nose. It just reminds your body to breathe through your nose. It's this kind of gentle training. And then over time, it strengthens nasal breathing as your default setting. Even during the day. So like you're training yourself all night, you have a tendency then throughout the day to breathe through your nose. For most people, it probably takes a few nights to adjust. I mean, it is, it is weird out the gate. I don't remember it being all that weird for me, but I'm sure it had to have been. If you wake up feeling claustrophobic, then, then start with partial, like partial tape, okay, like just a little bit across the center of your mouth. So that your lips are maybe not fully sealed, but they're sealed somewhat. There are, there are tapes, like I said, made for this purpose. I use something called hostage tape. I think 3M makes some sort of micropore tape. I'm sure there's some other tapes out there if you just Google it. And as far as I know, they're safe, they're breathable, they're skin-friendly. By the way, like, if I wake up and I'm like, gosh, I just don't feel like wearing this, I take it off. Like, it's not the end of the world if you put it on and your body wakes up or you're not able to breathe the way you like, or maybe once in a while, like right now, if you can't tell by the way my voice sounds, I'm a little stuffy. It might make it tougher for me to use the tape and maybe I won't use it tonight or whenever my nose is— I have some congestion. But for the most part, I always have it on at night. Now, again, Uh, you just like, you could rip this off if it doesn't feel good. Now I notice after, you know, after the first week or two that I was using it, I had less snoring. I felt like I had better hydration when I was waking up. I know that the data according to my Whoop and the Garmin I wear, and I'm a data geek as it pertains to this, I know I have more restful sleep. I have a higher HRV. I have a lower resting heart rate. And as a result, it only makes sense that I would have improved morning energy. Again, I have the numbers to say it— show this, and it may not be a massive change. I'm not talking like 20-30%, but 5-10% difference. This is not a placebo. There are measurable physiological shifts caused by better oxygen regulation. And, and it, and it's showing up for me. Now, during nasal breathing, just so we double down on the science here and why this works, during nasal breathing, your CO2 tolerance improves. And that means your body becomes better at using oxygen efficiently. Your bloodstream carries oxygen deeper into tissue, which is helping with recovery and energy production. When you mouth breathe, you blow off CO2 too quickly. And this disrupts the balance. And that could lead to restlessness and shallow sleep. So this one tiny piece of tape can make a rather big difference. It's not the tape doing the magic, it's the breathing pattern the tape enforces. So what might be the bigger lesson here? I think that mouth taping is, is one of those reminders that small things compound. You know, a piece of tape, a couple-dollar hack, it can outperform $1,000 sleep gadgets. And sometimes the highest leverage change isn't a new supplement, it's returning to how the body was designed to function. To me, this isn't so much a sleep hack as much as it is just a restoration of how I should be sleeping, which is breathing through my nose. So when I think about the No Days Off Nation, And I think about all that we talk about. Again, the idea here is get better at something every single day. I think peak performance starts with recovery. I think you can train like an animal, you can eat clean, you could work hard, but if your sleep is messed up, everything else is compromised. So, the next time someone laughs about taping your mouth shut, just laugh with them, just smile through your nose, you know, smile and then through your nose, make sure you're breathing. Knowing that you're giving your body this biological advantage. So my challenge for you, I can't really say it's an action item, uh, if you're laughing at this, if you say, "Not me," give it a try. Just test it out. You don't have to go buy hostage tape or whatever. Find some cheap breathable tape, just put it over your lips tonight and see what happens. Just see how it works. Just this micropore medical tape you could buy over at Walgreens. And just start with a small, like, one narrow vertical strip down the center of your lips. And then track your sleep quality for a few days and, and see how you feel. Notice your morning energy. Notice how rested you might feel. Because when you change how you breathe, you change how you sleep. And when you change how you sleep, everything in your performance changes. So give it a shot. That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.