I’m sharing this with the whole list because there is a brilliant brand that coincides with this week’s edition.
The purpose of this weekly missive is to join a group of people who are willing to examine every single behavior and aspect of our environment together. I want to make choices that lead toward a long, robust, rather than frail, life. I like you and want you to make these choices with me.
This requires working with the humanness of our psychology to persuade and nudge us all toward more robust choices.
Over the past eight weeks, I’ve written about robust choices relative to CranioSacral Therapy, Pilates, Feet, Air, Work, Highly Sensitive People, Akrasia, and The Detox Funnel metaphor.
Another such choice is mouth taping. And sweet baby Jesus, Hostage Tape is a brilliant brand of mouth tape (and why I have an affiliate link!). Here’s Martin and I with our mouths taped shut with Hostage Tape:
Why would we do such a thing?
I frequently witness people falling asleep on my table while practicing CranioSacral Therapy.
Sometimes, a client will stop breathing and their body will jolt into action to catch a breath. I tell them, of course, because it’s important that the estimated 25% of adults that have sleep apnea do something about it.
An airway that lacks enough space and or muscle tone is the root cause.
Just when a person with this condition fully relaxes, their airway collapses and the nervous system must kick in to create the tension needed to get enough air in.
A sleep test and possibly a machine that pushes in air (C-pap) might be needed. But not to worry, one of my mentors raves about the positive difference his C-pap has made to his life including more energy and clear headedness, and affectionately refers to his machine as Papina.
But even for those of us without full airway constriction, partial constriction can lead to teeth grinding, which is what I was researching that brought me to mouth taping as a possible solution.
Because breathing through the mouth while sleeping can cause all sorts of problems.
Snoring alone is a problem that can ruin relationships.
There seems to be a lot of evidence that human skulls over the last few hundred years have changed due to our diet and lifestyles. More processed foods leads to less chewing leads to development of smaller jaw bones and less defined face muscles. This leads to not getting enough air during sleep. Not getting enough oxygen seems like a problem strategists, at least, would want to avoid.
Not getting the right balance of carbon dioxide is surprisingly a problem, too, that leads to imbalanced metabolic processes.
Mouth breathing is a big contributor to cavities.
You get it. Mouth breathing = mostly bad.
You may have heard of the solution then to tape one’s mouth shut at night? I’ve seen more and more tips about this, with athletes taping up their mouths during the day in their workouts as well, but I have bought branded mouth tape online. More than once.
So I am wondering, have you heard of it? Have you tried it?
Basic medical tape down the center of your mouth is a good, cheap solution. This leaves the sides of the mouth accessible if you need to draw in our push out more air.
Trouble arises for folks with beards. They may need three strips or more across the mouth to keep the tape on at night.
Enter Hostage Tape. It is a well designed product that must have an insane profit margin. It’s a much stickier tape, probably a type of what I’ve had used on me called kinesiology tape by other bodywork therapists who use taping on the body as part of their offering.
So it is “professional” grade tape, sticky and stretchy, die-cut into a perfect oval, and each piece has slick paper backings like a plaster/bandage. They offer a little metal tin to store your tape supply and, of course, a subscription, to keep ‘em coming.
I’m not sure how difficult it would be to copy and undercut the product. But here’s what we like to see: a brand.
The rich, black tape that they use. Well you saw the photo, it looks like you’ve been taken hostage.
But there’s more to it, the weight of the tape is more dense compared to medical tape, the texture of the non-sticky side is wonderful.
It stays on all night for beardy men. But it ripped off some of my lip skin the first time I used it and that took 7 days to heal. Make sure to exfoliate!
For the brand elements, Hostage Tape went very masculine with bootcamp, military vibes. They partner with a masculine podcaster.
Important note for strategists: They have a distinctive tone of voice. Seems we’re always on the lookout for brands with some sort of tone of voice that isn’t lame. Hostage Tape delivers.
If you want to learn more about mouth breathing and mouth taping, here are two books I like (sharing my affiliate links so you can gift me some free books for pointing you in their direction):