Why Your Energy Starts With How You Breathe at Night
- Feb 17
- 3 min read
By Kusha Karvandi, PES, CES
What habit most improved your energy levels?
The single habit that most dramatically improved my energy levels — both personally and in my clients — is training the body to breathe through the nose during sleep.
Most people think of energy as something you manage with caffeine, supplements, or workouts. But energy is actually created at the cellular level, and oxygen efficiency plays a massive role in that process. When we breathe through the mouth during sleep, we lose carbon dioxide too rapidly. That matters because carbon dioxide isn’t just a waste gas — it’s required for oxygen to properly release from hemoglobin into the tissues (a principle known as the Bohr effect).
Chronic mouth breathing during sleep is associated with fragmented sleep, higher nighttime stress hormones, increased dehydration, and reduced nitric oxide production. Nitric oxide is critical for blood vessel dilation, oxygen delivery, and mitochondrial efficiency — all foundational to waking up feeling energized.
Mouth taping is a simple behavioral tool that helps retrain nasal breathing at night. It’s not about forcing airflow or restricting breathing — it’s about restoring a natural physiological pattern humans evolved with. When nasal breathing is restored during sleep, many people notice more stable energy throughout the day, fewer afternoon crashes, and improved mental clarity — without changing their caffeine intake.
From a performance coaching standpoint, this habit consistently outperforms more complex interventions because it works while you sleep. Better sleep architecture leads to better hormone regulation, better recovery, and better energy output the next day.
How do you define vitality beyond fitness?
Vitality is not just how strong you are or how many workouts you complete in a week. I define vitality as the ability to generate consistent energy while remaining calm, resilient, and mentally clear.
You can be fit and still feel wired, exhausted, or dependent on stimulants to function. True vitality shows up as steady focus, emotional regulation, quality sleep, and the capacity to recover quickly from stress. It’s a nervous-system concept as much as it is a physical one.
Breathing patterns are a great lens for understanding vitality because they sit at the intersection of physiology and nervous system regulation. Nasal breathing supports parasympathetic tone, nitric oxide production, and proper oxygen exchange — all of which influence how “alive” you feel throughout the day.
Vitality also includes how you wake up. If someone needs an alarm, multiple coffees, and a long warm-up period just to feel human, that’s a signal that recovery and oxygen utilization aren’t optimal — even if their workouts look impressive on paper.
What’s one health myth you challenge?
One of the biggest myths I challenge is the idea that fatigue is normal — especially as people age.
Low energy is often normalized as “just getting older,” “being busy,” or “having kids,” when in reality it’s frequently a sign of poor sleep quality, dysfunctional breathing, or chronic nervous system activation. These are modifiable factors.
Another related myth is that more effort is always the answer. People are told to push harder, train more, or add another supplement. In many cases, the solution is actually restoring basic biological functions — like breathing through the nose, sleeping deeply, and allowing the body to recover properly.
When people fix the fundamentals, energy often returns without needing extreme interventions.
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