Should You Tape Your Mouth Shut When You Sleep?
Credit - Photo-illustration by TIME
People have been talking up mouth-taping lately on TikTok and Instagram as a home remedy for snoring, insomnia, dry mouth, and other sleep-related issues—and the trend seems to be sticking. “Mouth-taping is very popular right now,” says Dr. Abhay Sharma, an assistant professor and ear-nose-throat doctor at the University of South Florida who monitors such trends, knowing his patients will bring them up.
For the uninitiated, mouth-taping is exactly what it sounds like: the mouth is taped shut, forcing the nose to take in air instead. Mouth-taping had long been the empty threat of spouses irked by their partner’s snoring, but now the TikTok tapers seal their own mouths voluntarily, looking for better sleep and more likes.
Anecdotes in support of mouth-taping aren’t as wacky as they may seem. Scientists find benefits to breathing mostly through the nose, rather than the mouth, even as more than 50% of Americans breathe regularly through their mouths. In theory, mouth-taping could help, but it comes with risks and limits, experts say. DIY fixes shouldn’t replace well-researched medical solutions, especially when serious health problems may be involved.
What does mouth-taping do?
Nasal breathing overnight could provide some benefits. This wasn’t a social-media discovery; nasal breathing was espoused by the ancients. “People have been talking about mouth breathing as a bad thing for centuries,” Sharma says. Ancient Indian medical systems, for example, emphasized nose over mouth breathing as central to enhancing energy.
Dr. Jonathan Jun, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Johns Hopkins, says nasal breathing was repopularized by James Nestor’s 2020 book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, in which Nestor describes his experiences with mouth-taping. The book “touted the benefits of nasal breathing in terms of overall health,” Jun says.
Social media took it from there. Of course, a flurry of posts on mouth-taping doesn’t necessarily reflect a real-world phenomena. Among Jun’s patients, “it’s not common,” he says, estimating 5-10% of his patients ask about it.
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His answer? Well, it’s true that the nose—more specifically the hair and mucus inside it—filters out dust and pathogens, filling the lungs with healthier air compared to mouth breathing, Jun says. Nasal passages also humidify the air, which is better for the respiratory system. Very small studies suggest that nasal breathing may bring more oxygen into the blood and lower blood pressure.
But Jun is skeptical of online posts connecting mouth-taping to better sleep, cardiovascular health, attractive jawlines, and general life improvement. Some people claim mouth-taping is good for asthma, but researchers haven’t found this effect. With the mouth sealed off, “people say anecdotally they sleep better, feel better, and have less dry mouth in the morning,” Sharma says. “But the research literature for mouth-taping improving all these things is not really there.”
Mouth tape for sleep apnea
Rather than trying to address mouth breathing with mouth-taping, it’s critical to figure out if you’re breathing this way due to sleep apnea, a condition in which disruptions in breathing wake people up repeatedly. “You would really want to talk with your doctor and have a proper airway exam,” says Eric Olson, a pulmonologist and sleep medicine specialist at Mayo Clinic and president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Sleep apnea is linked to serious problems such as heart attacks, strokes, and Type 2 diabetes. If you have it, well-researched solutions like a CPAP machine and oral appliances are available to help open the airway and avert chronic illnesses.
It’s especially dangerous to rely on mouth-taping if you can’t breathe through the nose. In this case, “mouth-taping can actually prevent being able to breathe” altogether, Sharma says. It could even cause sleep apnea, instead of just being a sign of it, he adds, “because you’re getting only minimal air.”
“When your mouth is open, the jaw moves down and back,” leading potentially to the partially blocked airway that’s often involved in the disorder, Olson says.
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Two studies report that mouth-taping helps people with mild cases of sleep apnea. These studies had few participants, so it’s hard to conclude much, Jun says. He thinks mouth-taping might benefit a subset of patients with simple snoring, but not worse sleep apnea. You can’t put a band-aid over a broken bone, and tape over the mouth is no match for severe sleep apnea.
Jun is starting a larger trial on mouth-taping to learn more about its use for milder cases. For now, “it’s a gray area,” he says.
A possible exception: If you’re diagnosed with sleep apnea and get a CPAP machine that covers the nose only, mouth-taping could make these machines more effective by reducing the amount of air escaping through the mouth, Jun says. (Chin straps have a similar effect.) Other combinations of mouth tape plus an oral appliance may help as well. “We do use mouth-taping in these clinical contexts,” Olson says.
Mouth taping for oral health
Some TikTokers swear that mouth-taping boosts oral health by preventing dry mouth. However, “there is no scientific evidence that mouth-taping has these effects,” says Matthew Messina, assistant professor of dentistry at Ohio State University.
Generally speaking, dry mouth can impact oral health negatively. Having enough saliva helps neutralize acids created by the mouth’s bacteria. This “natural buffer” fights cavities, and saliva’s “washing action” clears away bacteria and food particles, Messina says.
But if you’re low on saliva, mouth-taping isn’t the solution because most causes of dry mouth have nothing to do with mouth breathing. Rather, dry mouth is a side effect of over 600 prescription medications, Messina notes, and it may also be symptomatic of a chronic disease. In these cases, Messina says, “we see a fundamental change in the bacteria present in the mouth.”
So, if you have dry mouth, the answer isn’t mouth tape, but to consult your doctor about underlying health conditions that could be driving the problem. “We know dry mouth causes oral health problems, but there’s no evidence that taping your mouth shut when you’re sleeping at night is helpful,” Messina says.
The nose test
Even if you don’t have sleep apnea, discomfort with nose breathing may result from a nasal polyp, chronic congestion, or structural deformity—each of which should be treated by a doctor, not a piece of tape, Olson says. Respiratory infections, too, can interfere with nasal breathing in ways that make mouth-taping a bad idea.
“You’re supposed to breathe through your nose, but not everyone’s nose works,” says Seema Khosla, a sleep physician and medical director of the North Dakota Center for Sleep.
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Sharma recommends “the nose test”: try mouth-taping while awake. If you can tolerate it for an extended period of time, your nose is open enough to consider mouth-taping overnight, he says.
How to do it
If you’ve consulted doctors and ruled out underlying conditions requiring medical treatment, Sharma thinks it’s okay to try mouth-taping. Just do it safely.
If mouth breathing is simply a habit, maybe take the nose test a step further by mouth-taping regularly during the day, before trying it at night. Sharma recommends this approach to some patients to see if developing a new daytime habit leads to nighttime nasal breathing without the tape.
“Retraining your breathing is likely useful,” he says, while adding that this change is no easy feat, particularly for lifelong mouth-breathers. “It may be futile to try to condition yourself into doing something while you’re awake and hope it carries over,” Jun says.
Mouth-taping after heavy drinking is risky. If you throw up in your sleep and can’t wake up to remove the tape, the vomit could enter your windpipe and reach the lungs, Khosla says.
Another risk is getting worse sleep than usual, which affects mood, alertness, and performance the next day. “If you’re taping your mouth and have a nasal pathology, you’re really going to get fragmented sleep because you’ll keep waking up due to that breathing resistance in the nose,” Olson says.
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Whatever you do, don’t use duct tape, Khosla says. It’s not breathable and contains glue, an enemy of your skin.
The best tapes are made for skin and don’t fully cover the mouth, Jun explains. Rather, they’re placed over the lips vertically, so you can talk and breathe a bit around the tape. “It’s really just meant to serve as a cue to keep your lips touching each other,” Jun says.
Some people are sensitive or allergic to adhesives, even ones marketed as skin-friendly. If you have a bad reaction, try another tape or stop altogether.
Alternatives
“There are other ways to encourage nasal breathing besides mouth-taping,” Sharma says. Examples include sleeping on your side, nasal irrigation, allergy medications, breathe-right strips (which raise the sides of the nose, widening the nasal passages to allow more airflow), maintaining a practice of slow deep breathing, and alternate-nostril breathing.
Before mouth-taping, as with any DIY strategy found on the internet, talk with your doctors to make an educated choice. “I want my patients to be the CEOs of their bodies,” Khosla says. In addition to recommending mouth-taping for some patients on nasal CPAP, Khosla is “receptive to this idea of mouth-taping for others if we can understand it better and have more data from bigger trials.”
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