Nobody wants to spend the first three days of a vacation feeling lousy. Or come home from a business trip with something they picked up along the way.
So here’s a simple question: could paying attention to how you breathe help?
There’s a good biological reason to breathe through your nose. It has a whole system for handling the air coming into your body, including some chemistry most of us never learned about.
When you breathe through your nose, the air gets warmed and moistened before it reaches your lungs. Your nose does this much better than your mouth, which is useful when you’re spending hours breathing dry air.
That air also passes over mucus. We tend to think about mucus only when we have too much of it, but it has a job every day. It catches dust, particles, and some of the microorganisms that come in with each breath.
“Consciously breathing through your nose when you travel puts your own built-in air filter to work.”
Tiny moving structures called cilia then carry that mucus toward the back of your throat. You swallow it, usually without noticing. Your nose is constantly collecting and moving things along.
And this is where nitric oxide gets interesting.
Your nose and sinuses naturally produce nitric oxide. It helps support this cleaning process by encouraging the cilia to move. It also participates in your nose’s defense against germs.
Researchers studying human nasal tissue have found that certain bacterial signals trigger the cells to produce nitric oxide. That response helps kill bacteria and moves mucus along more quickly. Your nose can actually detect something and respond to it.
If you’ve trained for distance running, you may have experimented with breathing in through your nose. Nasal inhalation carries some of that naturally produced nitric oxide down into the lungs, where it can influence the blood vessels involved in picking up oxygen. That connection is real, even though it doesn’t automatically mean you’ll run faster.
For travel, the more useful point is that your nose already has several ways to deal with what you breathe in.
Does that mean closing your mouth on a flight will keep you from catching a cold? We don’t know how much changing that habit affects your chances of getting sick. But we do know that nasal breathing puts incoming air through your nose’s filtering, humidifying, and clearance systems.
It’s an easy habit to pay attention to. When you’re sitting at the gate, reading on the plane, or walking around, let your lips rest together and breathe gently through your nose if it feels comfortable. You don’t need to take huge breaths or force it when you’re congested.
We think about what we eat and drink when we travel. It makes sense to give a little attention to how we breathe, too.
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