After determining the cause of Megan’s open mouth, the next step was to help her fix it. By coordinating treatment with an allergist and her pediatrician, I was able to help Megan get relief from her allergy symptoms. Once she was able to breathe easily through her nose, I taught her exercises to retrain the muscles of her tongue and mouth, so that she could naturally rest her lips in a closed position. At the same time, it was important for me to teach Megan how to use her nose. After seven years of only breathing through her mouth, she needed practice using her nasal passageways. It’s an amazing honor and opportunity to work with these communities,” says Samson, who has worked with the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, as well as with various groups in Madagascar, Guatemala and elsewhere. Study participants generally wear a device called an Actiwatch, which is similar to a Fitbit with an added light sensor, to record their sleep patterns. Monitor yourself or your child for mouth breathing and/or an open mouth resting posture. How often does it occur during the day?

In a zoo or lab, animals might sleep less than is natural, because of stress. Or they might sleep more, Capellini says, “just because animals are that bored.” And the standard laboratory conditions—12 hours of light, 12 hours of dark—might not match what an animal experiences in nature throughout the year. Our ancestors transitioned out of the trees to live on the ground, and at some point started sleeping there too. This meant giving up all the perks of arboreal sleep, including relative safety from predators such as lions. So when it comes to sleep, think quality, not quantity. Instead of focusing on getting eight hours every night, ask your dentist ifyou grind your teeth (a red flag for sleep apnea)or if you snore ( there’s an app you can use for this). Having data from more wild animals would help sleep researchers. “But it’s technically challenging to do this,” Rattenborg says. “Although sloths were compliant with the procedure, I have a feeling primates would spend a lot of time trying to take the equipment off.”

The 8-Hour Sleep Paradox by Mark Burhenne PDF Summary

By contrast, a 2016 study of almost 500 people in Chicago found they spent nearly all of their time in bed actually asleep, and got at least as much total sleep as the Hadza. Yet almost 87 percent of respondents in a 2020 survey of U.S. adults said that on at least one day a week, they didn’t feel rested. There’s a lot of conscious effort and attention put on sleep in the West that is not the same in these environments,” he says. “People are not trying to sleep a certain amount. They just sleep.” And so Yetish suggests that ancient humans may have traded some hours of sleep for sharing information and culture around a dwindling fire. “You’ve suddenly made these darkness hours quite productive,” he says. Our ancestors may have compressed their sleep into a shorter period because they had more important things to do in the evenings than rest. Unsatisfied sleepers If your child is mouth breathing, s/he can learn to change the habit. That’s where I come in. It’s my job to help patients learn how to change the habit and breathe properly. Learning how to breathe through the nose instead of the mouth prevents my pediatric patients from a slew of serious health issues in adulthood, including sleep apnea, speech impediments, and improper facial growth. Terminology

Facial growth and development : It’s important to realize that growth is a very powerful force. A child with an open mouth will very likely grow into an adult with flatter facial features, less prominent cheekbones, a longer face, droopier eyes and lower facial muscle tone, a narrower palate, and even a smaller lower jaw in most cases. By closing the mouth and breathing through the nose, these negative growth patterns can be prevented. Speech : When children have an open mouth, they are more likely to struggle with certain speech sounds. The most commonly associated speech problem is a lisp, or the inability to say “S” sounds correctly. Speech is affected because when you have an open mouth, you also have what we refer to as a “tongue thrust swallowing pattern.” This type of swallowing pattern causes the tongue to protrude, or push forward during speaking and swallowing. Teeth and braces : If your mouth is open, your braces will take longer and your treatment will be much more challenging for your orthodontist. The spaces between your teeth will be more difficult to close and the stability of the alignment of your teeth will be compromised once your braces are removed. This means you are likely to experience orthodontic relapse and you may need braces again in the future. But Capellini isn’t sure that human sleep is as different from that of other primates as it seems. She points out that existing data about sleep in primates come from captive animals. “We still don’t know much about how animals sleep in the wild,” she says.

The natural position for healthy breathing is always with a closed mouth, inhaling and exhaling through the nose. Reading this book has provided me with the information I need to have a more informed conversation with my doctor on sleep apnea and makes me realize that my delay in treating sleep apnea is truly harmful to my health and well-being. Gandhi Yetish, a human evolutionary ecologist and anthropologist at UCLA, has also spent time with the Hadza, as well as the Tsimane in Bolivia and the San in Namibia. In a 2015 paper, he and other researchers assessed sleep across all three groups and found that it averaged between only 5.7 and 7.1 hours.

Deep stage sleep is different from all the other stages of sleep and is key to reversing the aging process and preventing disease. We feel a difference in temperature at night as we adjust to our surroundings. It is also common for people to sleep in cooler rooms. The idea is that damaged nerves may interpret the temperature change as pain or tingling, increasing the sense of numbness. Fossils of our ancestors don’t reveal how well-rested they were. So to learn about how ancient humans slept, anthropologists study the best proxy they have: contemporary nonindustrial societies.

Research by Samson and others in primates and nonindustrial human populations has revealed the various ways that human sleep is unusual. We spend fewer hours asleep than our nearest relatives, and more of our night in the phase of sleep known as rapid eye movement, or REM. The reasons for our strange sleep habits are still up for debate but can likely be found in the story of how we became human. Gandhi Yetish, a human evolutionary ecologist and anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has also spent time with the Hadza, as well as the Tsimane in Bolivia and the San in Namibia. In a 2015 paper, he assessed sleep across all three groups and found that they averaged between only 5.7 and 7.1 hours.