Last night, in my first run of self-inflicted nasal obstructed sleeping, my snoring increased by 1,300 percent, to 75 minutes through the night. Olsson’s numbers were even worse. He went from zero to four hours, ten minutes. I’d also suffered a fourfold increase in sleep apnea events. All this, in just 24 hours.
Now, lying here again, no matter how I try to relax and submit to this experiment, it’s a challenge. Every 3.3 seconds another blast of unfiltered, unmoistened, and unheated air enters through my mouth—drying my tongue, irritating my throat, and pissing off my lungs. And I’ve got 175,000 more breaths to go.
Two
MOUTHBREATHING
It’s 8:15 a.m., and Olsson bursts in, Kramer-style, through the side door of the downstairs flat I’m in. “Good morning,” he shouts. He has little balls of silicone lodged up his nose and is wearing cut-off sweatpants and an Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirt.
Olsson rented a studio apartment across the street from me for the month, close enough to sneak over wearing his pajamas, but not close enough to avoid looking like a freak doing it. His face, once tan and bright, is now gaunt and sallow, and he looks like Gary Busey in that police mugshot. He has the same spaced-out expression that he had yesterday; the same haunted grin that he wore the day before and the day before that.
Today marks the halfway point of the mouthbreathing phase of the experiment. And today, like every other day, as he’s been doing three times a day—morning, noon, and night—Olsson takes a seat across from me at the table. One-two-three, we flip on a pile of beeping and burping machines lumped on the table, strap cuffs to our arms, place EKG sensors on our ears, stick thermometers in our mouths, and begin recording our physiological data on spreadsheets. The data reveal what the previous days have revealed: mouthbreathing is destroying our health.
My blood pressure has spiked by an average of 13 points from where it was before the test, which puts me deep into stage 1 hypertension. If left unchecked, this state of chronically raised blood pressure, also shared by a third of the U.S. population, can cause heart attacks, stroke, and other serious problems. Meanwhile, my heart rate variability, a measure of nervous system balance, has plummeted, suggesting that my body is in a state of stress. Then there’s my pulse, which has increased, and my body temperature, which has decreased, and my mental clarity, which has hit rock bottom. Olsson’s data mirror mine.
But the worst part about all this is how we feel: awful. Every day it all just seems to be getting worse. And every day, at this exact time, Olsson finishes off his last test, removes the respirator mask from his cotton-white hair, stands up, and jams the silicone plugs a little deeper into his nostrils. He puts his sweatshirt back on and says, “I’ll meet you at ten-thirty,” then walks out the door. I nod and watch as he trots his slippered feet through the hallways and back across the street.
The final testing protocol, eating, happens alone. Through both phases of the experiment, we’ll be eating the same food at the same time and continuously recording our blood sugar levels while taking the same amount of steps throughout the day to see how mouthbreathing and nasal breathing might affect weight and metabolism. Today it’s three eggs, half an avocado, a piece of German brown bread, and a pot of Lapsang tea. Which means that, ten days from now, I will again be sitting in this kitchen, eating this same meal.
After eating, I do the dishes, clean up used filters, pH strips, and Post-it notes in the living room laboratory, and answer some emails. Sometimes Olsson and I sit around and experiment with more comfortable and effective ways to keep our noses blocked: waterproof earplugs (too hard), foam earplugs (too soft), a swimmer’s nose clip (too painful), a CPAP nose pillow (comfortable, but it looks like a bondage device), toilet paper (too airy), chewing gum (too slimy), and, finally, surgical tape over silicone or foam earplugs, which is chafing and stifling but the least atrocious of the options.
But most of the time, all day, every day, for the past five days, Olsson and I have just sat around alone in our apartments and hated life. I often feel as though I’m trapped in some sad sitcom in which nobody laughs, a Groundhog Day of perpetual and unending misery.
* * *
—
Luckily, today is a little different. Today, Olsson and I are going on a bike ride. Not on a beach boardwalk or in the shadow of the Golden Gate, but inside the concrete walls of a fluorescent-lit neighborhood gym.
The cycling was Olsson’s idea. He’d spent about ten years researching the differences in performance between nasal breathers and mouthbreathers during intense exercise. He’d conducted his own studies on CrossFit athletes, and he’d worked with coaches. He’d become convinced that mouthbreathing can put the body into a state of stress that can make us more quickly fatigued and sap athletic performance. He insisted that, for a few days during each phase of the experiment, we saddle up on stationary bikes and pedal to the edge of our aerobic capacity. The plan was to meet at the gym at 10:15 a.m.
I put on some shorts, grab the fitness tracker, an extra set of silicone plugs, a water bottle, and exit through the backyard. Waiting by the fence is Antonio, a contractor and longtime friend who has been doing renovation work on an upper floor of my house. He looks over, and before I can make a beeline for the garden exit, he notices the pink earplugs in my nose, drops an armful of two-by-fours, and comes over to take a closer look.
I’d known Antonio for 15 years and he’d heard about the oddball stories in far-off places I’d researched in the past. He’d always been interested and supportive. That ended when I tell him about what I’ve been up to this week.
“This is a bad idea,” he says. “In school, when I was young, teachers walked around the classroom, man, and pop-pop-pop.” He smacks the back of his own head for emphasis. “You’re breathing from your mouth, you get pop,” he says. Mouthbreathing leads to sickness and is disrespectful, he told me, which is why he and everyone else he grew up with in Puebla, Mexico, learned to breathe through the nose.
Antonio told me his partner, Janet, suffers from chronic obstruction and runny nose. Janet’s son, Anthony, is also a chronic mouthbreather. He’s starting to suffer the same problems. “I keep telling them this is bad, they try to fix it,” Antonio said. “But it’s hard, man.”
I’d heard a similar story from an Indian-British man named David a few days ago, when Olsson and I attempted our first nasal-obstructed jog along the Golden Gate Bridge. David noticed our nasal bandages, stopped us, and asked what we were doing. Then he told us how he’d had obstruction problems all his life. “Always plugged or running, it never seemed to be, you know, open,” he said. He’d spent the last 20 years squirting various drugs up his nostrils, but they became less effective over time. Now he’d developed chronic respiratory problems.
To avoid hearing more of these stories and to evade any more unwanted attention, I’d learned to go outside only when I had to. Don’t get me wrong: San Franciscans love weirdos. There was once a guy who used to walk Haight Street with a hole in the back of his jeans so that his tail—an actual human tail about five inches long—could swing freely behind him. He hardly got second glances.