This ominous trend has TikTokers in a frenzy – and footballer Erling Haaland is also speaking out in favor of the benefits. Here’s what happened when Julie I tried taping my mouth shut at night for a week.

Does taping your mouth shut at night work?

“Didn’t TikTok also tell people to eat bleach capsules?”

When I share on my Instagram story that, inspired by my TikTok For You page, I’m going to tape my mouth shut every night for the next week, this is the first response I get.

“This seems absolutely terrifying,” wrote another friend. “What if you suffocate your best friend xx,” wrote another, to which I replied, “I have a NOSE!” (Though thankfully I don’t suffer from sleep apnea or a deviated septum, which would ruin this experiment. You have been warned.)

TikTok disagrees with my cynical friends. “You’re about to have the deepest sleep of your life,” brags @lexfiish — aka Alexis Fischer, a Los Angeles-based fitness instructor — in a TikTok that has garnered 4.5 million views. “(Mouth taping) will prevent you from breathing through your mouth all night,” Fischer continues. Another user, @maysyoga_ — aka Dakota Mays, an Ohio-based yoga instructor — lists mouth taping as one of his top four tips for better sleep. As a self-professed mouth breather who struggles with restless sleep and frequent nightmares, I feel very seen. TikTok’s notoriously accurate algorithm strikes again.

@lexfiish, have you tried it? #mouthtape #mouthbreathing #breathe #wellnesstips #wellnesshacks #stitchthis #eveningroutine #wellness #sleeptips ♬ Dreamy – Elijah Lee

I’m not the only one who has trouble sleeping: 36 percent of Brits toss and turn in bed like me. Insomnia is a pandemic raging behind closed (bedroom) doors. The number of sufferers has increased by half during COVID, and the number of internet searches for “insomnia” was higher in 2020 than ever before.

I’m not the only one who has – albeit foolishly – turned to TikTok for advice. TikToks under “#cantsleep” have garnered a total of 751.4 million views, and videos under “#sleephelp” have reached 27 million. Dylan Charlie Middleton, 27, who suffers from long Covid, turned to TikTok earlier this year for breathing advice and started taping his mouth shut. “I could barely walk up the stairs without getting out of breath,” says Middleton. “The community on TikTok was pretty divided on whether mouth taping worked or not, but I decided to try it anyway.”

Is Fischer promoting a healing solution or a holistic health hoax? Although I’m skeptical, I’m won over by her soothing voice and lack of eye bags, and I’m desperate to ease my troubled sleep. Mouth tape seems as good (and cheap) an alternative as any. When I place my order online and commit to a week of mouth tape, I’ll pay £5.99 for 90 strips.

During my first night wearing a mouth band – which turns out to be a clear “X” peeled off a sticker sheet – my sleep is disturbed by the band fluttering out of my nose with gasps of breath and the adhesive struggling to stick to my smooth, moist skin. The same goes for the second night, when I wake up bandless and confused. Standing sleepy-eyed in front of my coffee machine, I scratch my leg and find the band on my thigh. How did it get there? I wonder. The secrets of the mouth band.

Nancy Rothstein, a sleep health expert known as “The Sleep Ambassador,” laughs when I ask her how I balance my nightly skincare routine with taping my mouth shut. “When I ask people, ‘What do you do in the half hour before bed?’ they always say, ‘I watch TV, I talk on the phone.’ But no one has ever said ‘my skincare routine.’ Out of all the thousands of people I’ve talked to,” Rothstein says incredulously. She’s obviously never spoken to Gen Z about it.

@traineffectiveofficial How Cyborg Haaland optimizes his breathing 🤖 #haaland #mouthband ♬ Original sound – Train Effective

Since I haven’t found a satisfactory solution, I reluctantly stop applying moisturizer to my mouth area for the rest of my experiment to give the mouth band a real chance. Over the next few nights, I notice some benefits. I don’t wake up as hungry as usual and I sleep deeply without waking up during the night.

Rothstein attributes this to my nervous system. “When you breathe through your mouth, you activate your sympathetic fight-or-flight nervous system,” she explains when I tell her about my usual restless sleep. “When you breathe through your nose, you activate your parasympathetic nervous system—you calm the nervous system, as opposed to a mouth breather, which puts the body on high alert.”

Taping your mouth shut is important because it encourages nasal breathing, Rothstein tells me. “You should breathe through your mouth as often as you eat through your nose,” she says. Yuck. “The nose filters the toxins out of the air and allows more oxygen to reach your organs than mouth breathing.”

The nose is a natural air filter and yogis often recommend nasal breathing to calm the body. Research has even found a link between mouth breathing and gum and throat disease. However, if mouth breathing is as bad as Rothstein believes, I would certainly have more health problems.

My doubts are confirmed: “The ongoing hype and talk on social media about this brand new breathing revolution is nonsense,” says Roger Price, a respiratory specialist. He warns me against mouth bandages: “Most of those giving advice have no training, experience or qualifications whatsoever. Their only claim to fame is that they read a book or attended a four-day online Zoom program that then ‘certified’ them as a ‘breathing professional.'”

Fischer is the kind of therapist Price warns me about. As I scroll further down her TikTok page, it’s obvious she’s selling mouth tape to lure naive TikTok scrollers into the world of holistic health – which she calls “The Self Love Experience” and sells for $75. I feel cheated. What is the health version of greenwashing?

As my week wearing a mouth band goes on, I become more and more cynical and excited to get back to normal. By the sixth night, I’ve somehow gotten used to breathing through my mouth even with the mouth band on.

Middleton had a similarly lukewarm experience: “Essentially, a mouth band prevents you from having bad breath when you wake up in the morning, but that’s about it,” she says. “It didn’t even make me breathe through my mouth any less.” On the recommendation of her GP, Middleton now uses inspiratory muscle training instead.

On my first night without a mouth tape, I rebelliously smear moisturizer around my mouth. But around 2 a.m. I wake up with a dry mouth and sweat. A nightmare – the first since I started taping my mouth shut. My mind goes back to Rothstein’s fight-or-flight theory. Another nightmare the next night. Oh dear… Although there isn’t evidence for all of Rothstein’s speculations, it’s possible that the mouth tape did make a difference.