Does “mouth breathing” really make you ugly? I’ll never dare to do it again after reading this…

If you enter the keyword "mouth breathing" in the search bar, you can see a lot of discussions about it. So, what exactly is mouth breathing?

As the name suggests, mouth breathing refers to breathing through the mouth instead of the nose for a long time . Most of the time, we breathe through the nose. But do you know how you breathe when you sleep?

There are rumors online that long-term mouth breathing will cause protruding teeth and make your face ugly. Is this true? Don't worry, let's look at them one by one.

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Long-term mouth breathing does have an impact on a person's facial features . In medicine, there is a term called " adenoid facies ," which refers to patients with enlarged adenoids who have poor nasopharyngeal ventilation and long-term mouth breathing, which eventually leads to elongated maxilla, high arched hard palate, protruding upper incisors, and even thicker lips . If you have this disease, your facial expressions will be lacking, and you will look a bit "dull."

If you breathe normally through your nose, your nose hair and nasal mucosa can moisten the inhaled air, and also filter and warm it . It can be said that the nose is the first line of defense for our body. However, if you have symptoms of a cold, nasal congestion or sinusitis, you will often start breathing through your mouth involuntarily.

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When you are awake, you can still control your breathing, but how do you tell if you are asleep? Generally, you breathe through your nose when you sleep, but if you snore at night or feel dry mouth when you wake up in the morning, you may be breathing through your mouth when you sleep .

Generally speaking, obesity and respiratory diseases can cause us to breathe through our mouths . Fat tissue in obese people will accumulate in the throat, causing nasal obstruction. For patients with respiratory diseases, if they have colds, sinusitis, asthma and other diseases, they are also prone to breathing through their mouths after falling asleep.

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Breathing through the mouth and having a blocked nose for a long time can easily cause hypoxia in the head , resulting in symptoms such as mental depression, headache, dizziness, memory loss, and slow reaction.

Of course, if we breathe through our mouth for a short period of time, such as when running to increase lung ventilation, we will also use our mouth to temporarily help us breathe. This situation generally does not cause changes in our facial appearance .

Reviewer: Tang Qin, Director and Researcher of the Science Popularization Department of the Chinese Medical Association