If you’re spending the day making a list of resolutions for 2025 (even if you’re not going to bother sticking to them by next week), here’s something you might consider adding.
Perhaps you’re wanting a bit of a glow up in this new year - whether it's a relationship glow up or a career glow up, a health or any other one, there’s really nothing wrong with that. You've got to do what you want to do.
So, if it’s the way you look that matters to you, there’s a habit you might want to avoid as a top neuroscientist labelled it as a reason behind why people are ‘getting uglier’.
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What you might think is a pretty common, innocent habit, could be the free way of getting your 2025 glow up going.
The habit
Dr Andrew Huberman has claimed that humanity is ‘getting uglier’ and suggested that mouth breathing is one of the ways that we’re ruining our own faces.
It’s worth bearing in mind that, for some, this is less of a habit and more of a way of life if they have things like sleep apnoea, a deviated septum and so on.
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The doc claimed if you breathe this way, you could get a receding jaw line, a hump on your nose, eye bags and crooked teeth as a result.
Apparently, it’s all down to opening your mouth, which drags your tongue down and pulls your chin back. It also pulls down more of your facial features, which can have a lasting effect. While you might think this all a myth, the American neuroscientist Huberman insists it’s true.
He claimed on the Modern Wisdom podcast that those over-using mouth breathing ‘have changes in the structure of the face that makes them far more unattractive than if they were to mouth breathe’.
Huberman added: “The characteristic change in the face when one over-does mouth breathing is that the chin starts to move back towards the neck and the eyes become droopy because there is less use of the sinuses.”
How to avoid it
Of course, it’s pretty hard to control while sleeping, but you can apparently train yourself to breathe through your nose during the day.
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The neuroscientist said: “Deliberately nasal breathing through most of your cardiovascular training will help dilate the sinuses which leads to better air flow which makes nasal breathing easier.”
While some people may have taken to using mouth tape overnight to stop them from mouth breathing in their sleep, it’s not always a good idea as you may have a medical issue that makes it hard to breath nasally as well it disrupting sleep.
So, focus on trying to do it during the day instead.
Jess Battison