Month: August 2017

ABC-TV News viewers across Southern California may be a little more reluctant to breathe through their mouths after watching this interview with breathing specialist and author Patrick McKeown. He warned KABC-Los Angeles News anchors Miriam Hernandez and Coleen Sullivan about the health dangers of mouth breathing and over-breathing, and described how using Mute may benefit your brain cells.

Explained McKeown, “Mouth breathing is endemic, both for children and adults, both during the day and also during sleep. It pretty much wreaks havoc … 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.

Thankfully, McKeown also shared ways to protect your health. “You can influence your body’s oxygenation by breathing normally. Normal breathing is through the nose, light and quiet. Notice how you breathe through the day and practice how you breathe during your sleep.”

One signal that you may not be breathing well at night is snoring. Said McKeown, “If you think about snoring, it’s the exchange of a large volume through a narrow space. People who snore breathe hard. So what we want to do is open up the nose but we also want to bring down breathing volume. So, there’s breathing re-education: simple exercises that you practice during the day and that help reset the breathing center in the brain, and then your breathing is lighter during sleep. And then open up the nose through nasal dilators, for example Mute.”

Mute helps open the airway during sleep. “If you look at my nostrils, they’re asymmetrical, they’re different sizes so I need to open up the airway.” He described how Mute does the task. “You insert them in the nose. They open up the nose and they make breathing easier.” He added that using Mute helps reduce snoring. 

“I have to emphasize the importance of nose breathing during sleep. If you have your mouth open, you’re twice as likely to have sleep problems including snoring and sleep apnea,” McKeown concluded.

If you think you are a mouth breather during the night, improve your breathing and your sleep by using Mute. Check out our store locator or purchase through www.oxygenadvantage.com using promo code ‘Buteyko’ to receive 20 percent off your next purchase. Also don’t forget to sign up for our Mute Snoring newsletter.

How much more might you get done today if you’d awakened more refreshed this morning? Do you even remember what being wide awake in the morning feels like? It turns out morning grogginess is common. It’s the number one sleep complaint heard by author Michael Gelb, DDS, MS, clinical professor at NYU College of Dentistry. “People are just exhausted on awakening,” he said. Gelb talked with Nieca Goldberg, MD, host of national SiriusXM radio show “Beyond the Heart” and answered listeners’ calls, explaining how they can breathe better, sleep better, protect their health and reduce snoring with over-the-counter products such as Mute.

“It’s not just that we’re not getting enough hours of sleep, it’s about our quality of sleep. Our airways very often are not open enough and we have some degree of constriction or resistance or narrowing of the airway,” said Gelb, an expert on this subject. “Of course it gets worse when you lay down at night.”

You can blame sleeplessness on evolution, not your flat pillow. Gelb explained that, “Our faces are shrinking. As our brains have gotten bigger, our faces have become more recessed.” He noted that kids’ mouths commonly don’t have room for their wisdom teeth anymore, and our jaws and sinuses are shrinking. “It’s become an endemic problem that a lot people have difficulty with their sinuses, difficulty breathing through their nose. And you see that if you walk into a Walgreens, walk into a Duane Reade, how many of these things are being sold over the counter that open up our airways.”

One solution to improve breathing? Gelb drew a lot of interest from listeners after he advised, “To keep the nose open at night we use Mute nasal stents. That just props the nose open, it improves nasal breathing and it really cuts down on snoring.”

As Gelb explained, “It’s adjustable in size, they come in small, medium and large depending on the size of your nostril. It doesn’t let the first part of the nasal airway collapse as we breathe in and breathe out.”

Gelb recommended starting with the simplest solutions for breathing issues: over-the-counter products, such as Mute. If you want to awaken more refreshed and try Mute tonight, you can find it at most major pharmacies. Use our store locator to find Mute, sleep better and feel better.