Episode 55: Are You Breathing? You’re Probably Doing It Wrong | Proper Breathing Technique with Shirley Gutkowski

I’ve known about proper breathing technique and oral posture for over five years now and I’m STILL doing it wrong if I don’t focus on it!

Seriously. Breathing.

If you’ve ever thought about your breathing – and most of us don’t because it’s so automatic – you might notice that you feel differently when you breathe differently. Breath drives a LOT of functions, from our mental health (think fast breathing when you’re anxious) to our behavior, sleep, cardiovascular and digestive health, and more.

Shirley Gutkowski thought she wanted to be an orthodontist, but a few careers in oral health later, she’s found something she’s really passionate about.

She says people simply don’t talk about breathing enough, and she’s on a mission to change that through education.

I’m so grateful for the time she spent with me on this interview, and my brain is bursting with ramifications in my own family after what I learned!

If you’re breathing…and you have children who breathe…this podcast is for you.

No time for the video? Here are the notes!

Proper Breathing Technique for Families

• 1:24: My guest today on the Healthy Parenting Handbook is Shirley Gutkowski, owner of Primal Air. 
• 3:20: Breathing is just instinctive right? Are there really rules for how to breathe correctly? Turns out there are. The way you breathe and hold your tongue in your mouth can impact your whole body.
• 4:03: Let’s start out by hearing Shirley’s story and how she came to specialize in mouth posture and breathing.
• 8:39: One of my kids was getting a cavity filled this summer and the dentist said she would be almost out of a job if it wasn’t for sugar. We were also referred to an orthodontist that has a slushy machine in their waiting room. What!? 
• 9:40: For a bit of background before we move forward, epigenetics is the study of how genes can change or be turned on and off by environmental factors. Since women are born with all their eggs in their ovaries, you can be impacted by trauma or chemical exposure that your grandmother experienced while pregnant with your mother. 
• 11:05: One of the outcomes we see now is “shrinking face.” This is why it’s nearly universal for people to have their wisdom teeth out these days. Our jaws grow due to pressure from the tongue against the back of the teeth. Breastfeeding also plays an important role in jaw development. When the jaw is too small, people no longer have room for all their teeth. 
• 13:08: If your mouth is too small, it’s also too small for your tongue so you end up opening your mouth and mouth breathing.

Proper Tongue Posture for Breathing

• 14:11: What is the optimal tongue posture? Primal tongue posture is having the tip of your tongue rest against the roof of your mouth behind your front teeth and then about 2/3 of your tongue continuing up against the palate. 
• 16:32: Proper oral posture also includes having your lips closed, and the teeth lined up correctly with each other. 
• 18:32: There are many negative side effects of mouth breathing including increased anxiety and snoring.
• 20:20: When you breathe through your mouth, you’re missing out on many processes that need to happen in the nose. The less you breathe through your nose, the more mucus builds up. When you breathe through your nose the air is warmed, moisturized, and cleaned up more than when you mouth breathe.

• 25:30: Mouth taping can be beneficial if you can breathe through your nose. Kids are old enough to use mouth tape when they can put it on and take it off themselves. Shirley recommends starting with just a sticky note and building up to tape. The important thing is to keep your lips together, don’t seal your mouth shut. Here’s more info on mouth taping.
• 26:53: My son’s new orthodontist said that mouth taping could just be a bandaid covering up a deeper problem if the true issue is that you can’t breathe properly through your nose. Shirley says that by beginning to breathe through the nose more often, you’ll get better at it, so it’s still worth trying. 

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Side Effects of Mouth Breathing

• 27:21: When you mouth breathe as a child, your sinuses stop growing before they should. This makes it hard to breathe for the rest of your life. 
• 27:58: There was a study done in the 80s showing how the amount of chewing has decreased over the years. It showed that 50% less chewing was happening post-WWII. When you chew more you’re actually strengthening the bones in your jaw. Children should be offered meat to help develop their bones. As a result of less chewing, our jaws are getting more and more narrow.
• 29:55: Almost everyone gets their wisdom teeth out now, it all comes down to what we eat, the epigenetic problems from our grandparents, and the amount of chewing and breathing. 
• 30:33: Babies need to learn how to use their tongues and chew their food. They need to eat some raw vegetables, and some cooked vegetables, but not so mushy they can be pureed. Peas are excellent, cucumbers can be given whole, broccoli can be given in chunks, and you can even give your little ones a steak bone with little bits of meat left on it to gnaw on.
• 32:14: Mouth breathing also leads to snoring. CPAP machines create a vicious cycle where your muscles that keep your airway open begin to atrophy and you end up reliant and in a worse position than before.
• 33:22: If you aren’t breathing properly, it’s important to take steps to learn how to do it. Humans will naturally breathe correctly in the right environment, but we’ve altered it so much. 
• 34:45: My husband doesn’t like eating meat off the bone because he says it’s too much work, but maybe that’s the point. It’s good work for the lips, tongue, and teeth to get the meat off the bones. It slows your eating down to give you a chance to smell, taste, and digest your food. 
• 36:39: If you have picky eaters I hope you are connecting some dots here. If your child starts off eating mushy foods, it changes their facial development and their tongue gets lazy. It’s no wonder, they now gravitate towards mushy, or easy-to-chew foods like chicken nuggets instead of an actual piece of chicken. They can eat these foods with less chewing which leads to poor digestion as well. 
• 37:40: People with tongue ties chew with their cheeks instead of their tongue so they pocket their food in their cheeks and learn to swallow larger pieces. This usually becomes a problem in their 40s. If you think your child isn’t chewing correctly you can have them evaluated for a tongue tie.
• 39:10: Shirley has worked with a 62-year-old woman who was in braces 3 times for a combined 11 years. Her tongue was so severely tied that it took two surgeries to release it. She has had the unexpected result that her lifelong constipation went away after getting her tongue tie released. 

• 41:10: There’s a trend in the medical community to say “This happens so often it must be normal, so we’ll no longer fix it.” That concerns me. That’s lowering the bar. 

Is It Ever Too Late to Fix Mouth Breathing?

• 41:43: Is it ever too late to fix these issues we’ve been discussing? It’s never too late! Shirley has had patients in their 70s learn to breathe properly and change their health. 

• 43:34: If your child is mouth breathing or their teeth are crowded, find out why. If your dentist says to start saving up for braces, do something as soon as possible. An orofacial myofunctional therapist is who you want to look for. Shirley works virtually. 
• 45:25: Shirley has a book called More Than a Kissing Spot to teach parents what they need to know about breathing and facial development in their babies.

Resources We Mention for Proper Breathing Technique

• More than a Kissing Spot: Your New Baby’s Face
• The Purple Guide: Developing Your Clinical Dental Hygiene Career
• Find Shirley online
• Follow her on social media: Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram
• More about mouthtaping here.
• We really like Xlear for xylitol nasal spray. 

Shirley Gutkowski, RDH, has been breathing since before her first birthday. Finding out in 2014 that she was doing it wrong, and how that affected her life, even her life choices was a jaw-dropper!
In 2014 she was dragged to ANOTHER conference that was of tangential interest to her speaking topic: Minimal Intervention Dentistry and Dental Hygiene. Turns out that breathing is the best form of prevention in dentistry, cardiovascular breakdown, mental health, and so much more.

An author, speaker, and trainer, Shirley lives in the booming metropolis of Sun Prairie, where she’s the owner and primary practitioner at Primal Air LLC, which specializes in orofacial myofunctional therapy, breathing, chewing, sleep, and overall health. She and her husband Mark have five pretty spectacular grown sons, three stellar daughters-in-law, and two blindingly bright grandchildren.