Why taping your mouth shut at night probably isn’t a good idea

There is little good-quality evidence to support the social media trend of taping your mouth closed at night to alleviate breathing difficulties – and some scientists worry it could bring its own set of problems.

“The fad has taken off on social media,” says Ken O’Halloran at University College Cork in Ireland, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “Ultimately, there’s little evidence it works.”

In the past few years, some users of platforms like TikTok and Instagram have recommended using adhesive tape to close your mouth during sleep, in videos that have collectively been watched millions of times. This forces nasal breathing, which some people claim brings various health benefits, namely reducing breathing problems and thereby deepening sleep.

To explore if there is evidence to support this, Brian Rotenberg at Western University in Ontario, Canada, and his colleagues reviewed eight studies involving nearly 200 people with obstructive sleep apnea. This is a common condition where breathing temporarily stops or becomes restricted during sleep, often causing people to snore and repeatedly jolt awake due to low oxygen levels.

The studies threw up mixed results. In two of them, researchers tracked people’s breathing while they slept for two nights, with and without tape. These found that the tape reduced how often they temporarily stopped breathing or experienced restricted airflow. “This occurred a few times less an hour,” says Rotenberg.

But the remaining six studies, one of which was a randomised-controlled trial, found mouth taping was of no benefit for these problems. “The outcomes were very mixed, so the evidence is weak, and the studies were generally of poor quality with around a dozen or few dozens of people involved,” says O’Halloran.

Rotenberg also says that mouth taping could be problematic in itself. “If your nose gets blocked and your mouth is taped shut, you’re more likely to have those panic-inducing situations of not getting any air in.”

“People can just pull the tape off, but I’d imagine someone could get quite anxious when they wake, so I wouldn’t advise it,” says David Garley at The Better Sleep Clinic in Bristol, UK.

But some of the variation in the results could be due to differences in how mouth taping was done, says Rotenberg. Some of the studies defined it as a horizontal strip covering the entire mouth, while others were less specific, so it is possible that in some cases the mouth was only partly closed, he says.

Another limitation is that none of the studies tracked daytime symptoms. “It’s the tiredness and headaches in the day that cause substantial problems for people in the clinic [with obstructive sleep apnoea], but they didn’t look at that,” says Garley.

Until more research is available, people should speak to a doctor if they are experiencing breathing difficulties, he says. Approved treatments, such as CPAP machines that gently push air through a mask to keep the airways open, have been proven to help with obstructive sleep apnoea, says Garley.