What my WHOOP has to say about Mouth Tape

This article was written by Katie Gibson following her experience with mouth tape and Whoop

Did you have a good night’s sleep? 

The majority of people answer that question based upon how many actual hours of sleep they have had or maybe how they felt waking up. Yet, do we really know what is happening to our bodies when our heads hit the pillow?

The first time I tried mouth tape, I was convinced that I had slept better than normal. I actually felt myself entering into my parasympathetic nervous system, because the tape meant I was only breathing through my nose. However, because I have a wearable, I have been able to gather real scientific data about the effects of mouth-tape on deep sleep. 

As mentioned in my last blog, sleep experts suggest we should all be aiming for 25% of our sleep to be deep and another 25% to be in REM, in order for it to be truly restorative. Originally, I would have said that I was definitely hitting those targets because I honestly felt like I slept really well! Interestingly, once I started getting my sleep scores from my wearable, it appeared that I wasn’t actually getting close to those figures at all. 

To gather data, I tried wearing mouth tape for two nights in a row. It was really interesting to see that the data for both of these nights was almost identical, from the hours asleep to the deep sleep and REM scores. On the third night, I slept without mouth tape and the scores were completely different! I had slept for more hours but when I checked my wearable it revealed that the quality of both my REM and deep sleep had been much lower than the previous two nights. In fact, my deep sleep had dropped to only 18% compared to being around 30% whilst wearing mouth tape. If I hadn’t been tracking my sleep with a wearable, then I may have easily assumed more hours would have meant a direct correlation with the quality of sleep.

Lets look at the data!

Night 1 wearing mouth tape 

Hours of sleep	Deep Sleep	REM Sleep
6:19	32%	18%

 

Night 2 wearing mouth tape 

Hours of sleep	Deep Sleep	REM Sleep
6:11	31%	17%

 

Night 3 NOT wearing mouth tape 

Hours of sleep	Deep Sleep	REM Sleep
9.35	18%	14%

 

Excited by my initial findings, I began to wonder - what might be the effect of wearing mouth tape consistently?

So, I committed to wearing mouth tape for 5 days in a row to see what the impact would be on my sleep. Once again, the results spoke for themselves. Each night I wore the mouth tape, my overall sleep performance never dropped below 86% and I scored at least 50% of restorative sleep per night. Thursday evening ended up being my richest and restorative night of sleep during the whole month! I spent a whopping 31% of the night in deep sleep and an equally impressive 29% in REM. The following night was also impressive where I scored 25% in deep sleep and 33% in REM, actually beating my target of 25% in each stage of the sleep cycle. After those nights I’ve just mentioned, I did feel good in my body and mind when I woke up. However, having my wearable’s data meant I have been able to confirm that a). I had slept well and b). It was because I had been wearing mouth-tape.

Wearing mouth tape consistently or even just a few times a week will make a huge difference to your quality of sleep. It’s a seriously powerful tool backed by data!

So if you were on the fence on whether mouth tape ACTUALLY works - hopefully this has confirmed to you that it does