How you breathe impacts your facial structure

Did you know the way that you breathe actually dictates the whole structure of your face?

And even the alignment of your spine?

This is huge!

We know that as a child, everything is growing and developing and adapting and the way that we breathe actually has a huge influence over this. So as children, if we are breathing often with our mouth open, what this does, is it changes the placing of the tongue, because our mouth is open all the time, and we're not using your nose for breathing. So instead of the tongue sitting on the roof of the mouth, as a supposed to sit, it actually just kind of hangs open, and because of this, this actually means that our jaw is unable to develop properly, and our airways are unable to develop properly.

So what does this look like?

This looks like, later on, smaller airways, which makes it harder to breathe through our nose later because everything is smaller.

This looks like a jaw that is not fully formed.

So that means our teeth are going to be crooked. It could mean that our mouths never quite stays closed. It might mean that are jaw is a little bit receded and all of this is dictated because of the way that we breathe.

It is so important as a mother, to be able to teach our kids, to be able to breathe through their nose. Often our kids can go through things and have breathing issues. Perhaps there's problems with their adenoids or any kind of respiratory things and perhaps that functional thing is fixed, but the breathing habits are still there. And this is something that we're not addressing.

We can solve so many of these issues by actually addressing those habits and retraining the body to start to breathe through the nose.

From a postural perspective if we're always breathing through our mouth, our bodies are trying to get more air. So what happens we're going to start to slump forward and then all the sudden we have this forward posture. And over time, what happens is that actually forms the structure of our spine, and then all of a sudden we have this rounded posture.

It's then going to further exacerbate our breathing. So not only do we start with a breathing problem, then we get a functional problem and then that makes the breathing harder. So it's just this vicious kind of cascade.

So if you're a mum, listening out to (or reading) this, now's the time to just gently close your little person's mouth. It's important.