It started with congested nose
Mouth breathing is a seemingly innocent behaviour. However when untreated, may lead to many health related problems. Since I was a child I used to constantly breathe through the mouth. Day and night. I was never aware that the health issues I was experiencing were related to that. Until I fixed my breathing. When I was 38 years old I discovered a Buteyko method – breathing exercises that decrease the volume of air needed for breathing. These exercises brought some relief already after a few days. The next 6 months was an adaptation period. I was practicing daily. Finally I switched from mouth to 100% nose breathing.
The most important is the fact that 28 health issues disappeared from my life. Chronic fatigue, chest pain, restlessness, headaches, problems with swallowing and many many more, they literally were no longer existing in my life.
Sleep apnea
At the very late stage of mouth breathing story I started to experience first events of obstructive sleep apnea. It’s terryfying when you stop breathing during sleep. Sometimes you don’t know it happened, sometimes you wake up suffocating.
Although this problem also disappeared when I switched to nose breathing, I became very curious what happens to my respiration when I sleep. I started to research and study. I wanted to find a way to measure what happens to my breathing during sleep.
App that ‘listens’ to your breath
Because I have a background in software engineering, I created a simple smartphone app that was listening to my breathing sounds when I sleep, and it was counting my mouth exhales. So I knew in the morning if I kept on breathing in a healthy way or my bad habit of opening the mouth came back. I started to talk to everybody about my journey and about this app. It became clear that this could actually help someone and that there is a business potential.
