Living document · last updated 28 April 2026
You've probably been told to remind your child to close their mouth, breathe through their nose, hold their tongue against their palate. Twenty times a day. Maybe a hundred. You've felt the fatigue of it — and you've watched your child stop hearing you. You've seen a healthy concern slowly turn into a battleground neither of you wanted.
The reason that approach fails isn't lack of effort, and it isn't lack of love. It's that habit change requires immediate, contingent, neutral feedback — feedback that arrives at the exact moment of the behavior, every time, without judgment, from a source the child has no relationship with. A parent cannot deliver this. No parent can. It is structurally impossible while also being the parent.
Nasal is the neutral party. The app handles the corrections so you can stop. Your role becomes setting up the session and being present. Nasal does the rest.
When the therapy works, your child internalizes the breathing pattern and no longer needs Nasal — or you — to remind them. They've learned to remind themselves.
Nasal is unusual among therapies because it makes things easier for every party involved, not harder. There's no party that loses something for the therapy to work.
| You, the parent | You stop having to be the constant corrector. The 100-times-a-day reminder is no longer your job. You go back to being the parent. |
| Your child | They keep doing what they want — watching their videos, playing their games — without losing access. The screen they were going to use anyway becomes the place where the therapy happens. |
| Your clinician | Compliance — the biggest reason myofunctional therapies fail at home — becomes much easier. The clinician sees better outcomes because their prescription actually gets followed. |
| The therapy itself | Mouth breathing during low-attention screen time is one of the highest-frequency moments where the habit forms. Nasal targets exactly that moment, daily, in the only context where it's hard to catch otherwise. |
The shift is that screen time stops being a problem to be minimized — and becomes the substrate where the therapy lives. For 30 minutes a day, your child's body is in a low-arousal, attention-captured state that happens to be ideal physiological conditions for habit reshaping. Most parents and most therapies treat that window as wasted. Nasal turns it into the most clinically productive 30 minutes of the day.
Nasal helps your child notice when their mouth opens during a passive task — usually watching a video on a tablet — and gently nudges them back toward nose breathing. It does this without supervision, without effort on your child's part, and without removing the activity they enjoy.
The principle is simple. Mouth breathing during screen time is often a default your child has fallen into without awareness. Awareness, repeated and consistently, is what lets the nervous system update the default. Nasal provides that awareness — quietly, in the moment — so your child can correct on their own. No willpower required, no daily struggle.
Your child watches a video they choose, or plays a calibrated game. If they breathe through their nose, nothing changes — the experience is uninterrupted. If their mouth opens, the app may do nothing at all, show a gentle reminder, soften the screen briefly, or pause the video. The moment their mouth closes, the screen returns to normal.
There is never a punishment. There is never a score they have to beat in real time. There is never a withholding of access. The feedback is contingent (it happens precisely when their mouth opens) and immediately reversible (it stops when their mouth closes). This is what allows the nervous system to learn — and what makes the therapy painless to participate in.
Most people think of the nose as a passive opening — air goes in, air goes out. It is actually a precision instrument with moving parts, an active shape, and several jobs to do at once. Two small muscles control how open it is, and a set of curled bony shelves inside (called the conchae or turbinates) shape the air as it passes through. When all of this works well, breathing through the nose is dramatically better than breathing through the mouth — even during heavy effort like running. When it doesn't work well, the body falls back on the mouth, and a long list of problems can follow.
This section explains what the nose actually does, why training it matters, and how to do that training correctly. Nasal the app addresses one specific window — passive screen time — where the wrong default forms. The training described here works alongside it.
Two muscles work together to open the nasal airway from the outside. They sit at different points along the airflow path, and they open different parts of it.
This is the small muscle on each side that pulls the nostril wall outward when you breathe in. You can see it work in a mirror: take a sharp inhale and watch the side of your nostril flare out. It opens the deeper, narrower part of the airway — the part that tends to collapse inward when you inhale hard, the same way a thin straw collapses if you suck on it too strongly.
The longer name for this muscle is levator labii superioris alaeque nasi — but you only need to know what it does. It lifts the upper lip slightly and pulls the wing of the nostril upward and outward. This opens the nostril opening itself — the visible rim — and aims incoming air upward into the deeper parts of the nose where the most important work happens.
Both muscles together open the airway at two different points: the rim (the outer doorway) and the deep nostril (the inner doorway). Engaging both gives you the maximum airway opening. Most people with breathing difficulty are using neither.
You don't need to learn each muscle separately. Your body already has a ready-made motor program that activates both at the same time, in the right order, timed to the inhale. It is called sniffing.
When you sniff to investigate a faint smell — imagine trying to identify whether dinner is burning, or sniffing a flower to find its scent — your brain automatically opens the nostril rim, opens the deeper nostril, and pulls air inward in a sharp, efficient pulse. All the muscles fire together. The airflow is aimed upward, where the nose can do its best work on it. This is the action you want to train.
You may have read elsewhere that "making a disgust face" trains these muscles. It does not. Disgust uses the same lifter muscle, but bundles it with closing the deep nostril and a quick exhale — the body's way of pushing bad smells out, not in. That is the opposite of what you want. A sniff is a deliberate inhale with everything open. A disgust face is a closed exhale. Same muscle, opposite outcome. Always practice the sniff.
Sniff sharply, as if checking whether food has gone off, or trying to catch a faint scent. Notice that your nostrils widen and your upper lip lifts very slightly. That is the correct pattern.
Now do the same opening, but stretch the inhale to four seconds. Keep the nostrils held open the whole time, not just at the start. This is harder than it sounds and is where the real training happens.
Do the long sniff again, but without the audible sound. Keep the feeling of openness, lose the noise. You should feel cool air entering high up inside the nose.
Practice the long, quiet, open inhale through ordinary breathing — at rest, while reading, while walking. Over weeks, this becomes how you breathe without thinking about it.
Five minutes, two or three times a day, is enough to see real change in a few weeks.
The most common objection is: "I can't breathe through my nose when I run." For untrained people that's often true. After training, it becomes possible — and it is genuinely better. Here is why.
The conchae — the curled shelves inside your nasal cavity — are not just there to warm and humidify the air, though they do that brilliantly (warming cold air to body temperature in a fraction of a second, adding moisture, filtering out particles). They also shape the airflow into a slow, organized spiral as it travels down the airway.
This matters more than people realise. Air that has been spun into a spiral by the conchae behaves differently in the lungs than air that arrives as a uniform mass through the mouth. The spinning air mixes more thoroughly with the air already in your lungs, reaches deeper into the small airways, and contacts more of the lung's surface where oxygen actually crosses into the blood. Mouth breathing pushes a "dull mass" of air in and out — the lungs work, but they don't work as efficiently. Nasal breathing delivers the same volume of air in a form the lungs can use better.
Your sinuses — the air-filled cavities around your nose and cheekbones — continuously produce a gas called nitric oxide. When you breathe in through the nose, this gas is swept along with the inhaled air and delivered to your lungs. In the lungs, nitric oxide widens the small blood vessels and the small airways, helping more oxygen cross into the blood from each breath.
When you mouth-breathe, you bypass the sinuses completely. The nitric oxide stays trapped in the sinus cavities and is wasted. You inhale plain ambient air, with no gas-exchange enhancement. Over millions of breaths, this difference adds up.
Trained nasal breathing during endurance exercise — running, cycling, swimming — produces equal or better performance at the same effort, with measurably better gas exchange, lower minute ventilation, and improved CO₂ tolerance. The result is more oxygen actually delivered to working muscle per breath, not less. For sprinting and absolute maximum efforts, the airway eventually does become limiting and mouth breathing kicks in. But for the long, sustained efforts that make up most exercise — and certainly for ordinary daily life — nasal breathing is unambiguously better. The "long sniff" extended into a full inhale is the technique that lets you keep nasal breathing under load.
Nasal anatomy varies a lot between individuals, and some of that variation tracks with where your ancestors lived for a long time.
Populations whose recent ancestry traces to cold, dry climates — much of Northern Europe, Northeast Asia, the Arctic — tend to have evolved narrower, longer nasal passages. The longer path gives more time and surface area to warm and humidify cold, dry air before it reaches the lungs. That was a survival advantage for thousands of years. The trade-off is higher resistance to airflow, and a stronger tendency to switch to mouth breathing when the body wants more air than the narrow passage can deliver easily.
Populations whose ancestry traces to hot, humid climates tend to have wider, shorter nasal passages — less restrictive, easier to keep open under load. Populations from hot, dry or high-altitude environments fall in between, and notably, anatomy and skin colour do not always travel together — people from highland East Africa, for example, often combine dark skin with relatively narrow noses, because the local climate selected for both independently.
The practical point: if you have a narrower nose, you start with higher airway resistance, and you will likely revert to mouth breathing sooner under effort unless you actively train the muscles that hold it open. This is not a defect — it is a normal anatomical variant your ancestors selected for a different climate. But it does mean training matters more for you than for someone with a naturally wider nose.
If you cannot do this comfortably yet, that is what the training is for. Start with the four-step sniff progression above, practise daily, and the rest will follow. Nasal the app supports this work in one specific context — passive screen time, where mouth breathing forms most easily without notice. The training above extends the same skill to the rest of the day.
Nasal uses your device's front-facing camera during sessions. Here's exactly what that means and what it doesn't:
The camera is used as a sensor, not a recorder. Frames are analyzed on the device in real time and discarded immediately. Nothing is recorded. Nothing is transmitted. No video, no images, no faces.
The only thing that ever leaves the device is anonymized event data — when a mouth opened, how long it stayed open, whether the eye region suggested a yawn — sent to your clinician's dashboard for review.
If you've ever used a fitness tracker that counts steps, the principle is similar: a sensor watches a behavior, counts events, and stores numbers. There's no footage. There's nothing to be lost or leaked. Your child's face is read by software for one purpose — recognizing whether the mouth is open or closed — and the underlying pixels are gone the moment that's done.
Nasal therapy moves through four phases. Each phase has a different job, and the app behaves differently in each one. Your clinician decides when your child moves between phases.
Plan for roughly three to four months at one session per day. Children using the app daily typically reach mastery within that window. Children using it less frequently — every other day, or with breaks — take longer. There is no rush; consistency matters more than intensity.
You'll notice that the app introduces things gradually. Nasal breathing first — just that. Once that's becoming automatic, a small reminder for tongue posture is added. Later, the practice may extend beyond screen time into other moments of the day. Each layer waits for the previous one to settle before the next is added.
This is slower than asking your child to learn the whole picture on day one. It is also the only approach that works. Children's nervous systems can install one new motor pattern at a time, not three. We choose the order, and we wait.
Your child sees a small visual reward as they accumulate sessions: a seed that grows into a sprout, sapling, young tree, and eventually a forest. Both video sessions and breathing-game sessions count toward the tree.
The tree is just for them — it's encouragement, not the clinical measure. Your clinician tracks something different (the phases above). A child can be at "Sprout" while still in the baseline phase, or at "Forest" while still in discipline. The two systems don't need to line up; they're doing different jobs.
Skins. Each profile in the picker has a small palette icon (🎨) next to the name. Tapping it opens a chooser with eighteen colour themes — twelve dark, six light — so the app can be tuned to what feels good for that profile. The choice saves per profile, so siblings sharing a device can each have their own look. It's purely cosmetic; the breathing detection, the prompts, and the session data work the same way regardless of which skin is selected.
Open Nasal. Pick a video your child wants to watch (from the curated library, or paste a YouTube link). Hand them the device. Make sure the front camera can see their face. They watch; the app does the rest. Twenty to thirty minutes later the session ends and you're done.
Daily consistency is what makes the therapy work. One session per day, every day, beats three sessions on Saturday and nothing the rest of the week. The nervous system needs the overnight gap between exposures to consolidate what it learned.
If life happens and your child does multiple sessions in one day — busy parent, long afternoon, whatever the reason — that's fine. Those extra sessions are still real and still count toward the tree. They just don't accelerate the clinical progression. The therapy moves at the pace of days, not at the pace of sessions. One day equals one increment of progress, no matter how many sessions happened in it.
What your child watches matters more than you might think. Fast-paced, high-stimulation content (the bright, rapid-cut style of many popular toddler shows) puts your child's nervous system into a state where mouth breathing is more likely. Slower, lower-stimulation content makes it easier for them to stay in their body while watching.
Your clinician can advise you on what content fits your child's current phase. In baseline and early practice, calmer shows are better — they help establish the foundation. Later, faster content can actually become a useful test: if your child can hold nasal breathing through Cocomelon, they've truly learned the skill.
A short tour of the screens, so nothing surprises you the first time. The app keeps the chrome minimal — there's no settings maze, no hidden menus. Most of the time you'll see only the home screen and the screen running the activity.
The home screen, schematic. Library appears once your child is enrolled with a clinician; Games appear after the first sessions; Monitor (dashed) appears later when your clinician unlocks it.
This is what opens when your child starts the app. A short list of activities: YouTube for any online video, Library for content your clinician or the Nasal team has curated, Device videos for files saved on the phone or tablet, Reader for websites and PDFs. Below those, a Games section appears with the fish game once your child is past the very first sessions. Monitor appears later, when your clinician unlocks it.
There is no kid-facing complexity on this screen. Tap an activity, you're in it. There's no "settings" your child can break.
A search bar at the top — type what you want to find, hit Search. Below the search are short links to your recent searches (so you can re-run "peppa pig short" with one tap). Below that is a place to paste a YouTube link — useful if your child has a specific video in mind and you have the URL. Below that, a Recently watched list of videos this child has actually played in past sessions, so you can pick the same one again easily.
The video plays inside Nasal, not in the YouTube app. That matters: it means the dimming and the prompts work, and your child can't tap their way out into the rest of YouTube.
Curated videos in two sections: From your clinician (videos the clinician has chosen for your child specifically) and From the Nasal team (a small set of safe, age-appropriate videos pre-stocked for everyone). The Library only appears once your child is enrolled with a clinician — before that, it's hidden. Tap a video to play it, exactly the same as if you'd searched for it.
For when you don't want anything from the internet — family videos, downloaded shows, your child's own recordings. Tap to pick a file from your phone or tablet's storage. Nothing is uploaded, nothing leaves the device.
The app can run during reading too — websites, PDFs, EPUBs, plain text. Paste a URL, pick a file, or browse a small library of starter content. When your child's mouth opens, the text blurs the same way a video would dim. This matters as your child grows: the breathing skill needs to transfer beyond cartoon-watching, and reading is one of the easier transfer modalities to set up at home.
A small fish game where your child's lip seal directly drives gameplay. Calm swim is the starter version — the fish swims forward whenever the mouth is closed, slowing down whenever it opens. Collect bubbles, score points, simple. Active swim is the unlocked version: the fish is also steered up and down by tilting the head, which trains the breathing skill while doing something more demanding. Active swim is gated — your child has to score well on a few Calm swim sessions before it unlocks, because the head-tilt steering requires the seal to already be reliable.
Games are deliberately short and finite. They're not a Nasal session in the clinical sense; they're an engagement layer that keeps the app fun on days when your child doesn't want to watch a video. They count toward the tree but not toward the clinical phase.
Off-screen passive observation. The phone goes on a stand, camera pointed at your child, and they do something else for fifteen minutes — drawing, Lego, watching TV from the couch, puzzles. There's no UI for the child during this time. The app simply watches in the background and records when the mouth was open versus closed.
Monitor only appears in the home screen once your clinician has enabled it — typically after the basic skill is forming and they want to see how your child breathes when they're not in front of a screen. This is where the data gets most clinically interesting. If you'd like to use Monitor sooner — say, because you're curious how your child breathes during reading or homework — ask your clinician to unlock it earlier. It's their call, but they can do it.
Once an activity starts, the app moves through three phases. First, a brief calibration — your child is asked to sit normally for a few seconds while the app learns what their resting face looks like. Then the activity runs (video, reader, game). When the session ends, a short summary appears with a score, the time spent, and a tree-progress note. Tap "Done" to return home.
During the activity, a small panel at the bottom of the screen shows the elapsed time, an event counter, and an "End" button — for the rare case when your child needs to stop early. Otherwise the panel is unobtrusive and your child shouldn't have any reason to interact with it.
Nasal supports two optional PINs that your clinician can set up for your child's profile. The PINs are managed by your clinician — not from inside the app. If you want either one set, changed, or removed, ask your clinician at your next visit (or message them). They can do it from the dashboard.
The two PINs are separate things, with separate jobs:
The child PIN is for switching between profiles, when more than one child in the family uses the same device. It keeps each child's data and lock behaviour distinct. If only your child uses the device, you don't need this one. If siblings share, it's helpful so a younger child doesn't accidentally open the older one's profile.
The parent PIN is for the small number of actions that shouldn't be at a child's fingertips — ending a session early, removing the profile from the device, and a few similar things. If your child is the type who would tap "End" to skip a session, the parent PIN keeps that decision in your hands. If your child wouldn't do this, you may not need a parent PIN at all.
Both PINs are four digits, stored only on this device (and as a one-way hash on the server). If a PIN is forgotten, there's no email-reset path — your clinician will simply set a new one. That's a feature, not a limitation: it means PINs can't be intercepted or recovered by anyone outside your clinical relationship.
Most families start with neither PIN, then add the parent PIN if they find it helpful. Talk to your clinician about what fits your situation.
When the app detects an open mouth, it can show a short text prompt on screen — typically two short phrases. The first one appears immediately ("gentle prompt"), the second one only if the mouth stays open for a few seconds ("firm prompt").
This is what the Messages & Response settings panel looks like in the app:
The first two rows are the text prompts. The third row controls how long the mouth needs to stay open before the firmer prompt appears. The fourth row, Response, controls what the app does visually — typically pausing the video and slightly blurring the screen, so the screen-time itself stops being rewarding until the lips close again. This is the gentle nudge mechanism we described earlier; the prompts on top of it are just there to label what the app is asking for.
The fifth row, Audio cue on trigger, is currently a placeholder. The intention is for a short, gentle chime to play when the mouth opens — paired with the visual prompt — so that over time your child associates the sound with the prompt itself, the way a familiar notification builds an automatic reaction. The chime is meant to be soft and pleasant, not startling. Leave this toggle off for now. The audio cue feature is still being designed, and the version that ships next will be introduced gradually, late in the Practice phase, just before Monitor sessions begin — so by the time your child is breathing well off-screen, the sound has become a learned cue they carry with them.
These settings live in the app's settings menu, and you can edit them — but in almost all cases, you don't need to touch any of this. The defaults work for most families, and the underlying response patterns (the gentle nudges, the dim, the audio) are managed by your clinician through the protocol.
The one case where parents do edit these settings: if you'd prefer the prompts in a different language. Slovenian, German, Italian, Spanish — write whatever short phrase your child will understand. The prompts are plain text, no character restrictions beyond length. Keep them short (under 40 characters) so they don't crowd the screen.
These prompt settings are an older part of the app, predating the more refined response patterns your clinician now uses through the dashboard. The clinician's settings take precedence; the app-side prompts are a small visible touch on top of what the protocol is already doing.
From time to time — at the end of a phase, after a stretch of sessions, or on a schedule you and your clinician agree to — you'll receive a short PDF report by email or at a visit. It's called the Progress Report, and it summarises what the app measured during the period it covers. It's intended to support the conversation between you, the clinician, and your child — not to replace that conversation.
Here's what the two pages contain.
Schematic only — actual reports have your child's real numbers. Layout subject to small refinements across versions.
Period. The dates this report covers. Reports usually cover a phase, a month, or a stretch your clinician chooses.
Patient block. Your child's alias and enrollment code. No personally-identifying information appears anywhere — names are not stored in the system; aliases like "Bee" or "Pippin" are used so the report can be discussed without identifying who it's about.
Where you are in the journey. The four-phase bar shows which phase your child is currently in: Baseline (silent measurement), Practice (gentle introduction of prompts), Discipline (the main therapy phase, every event meets a cue), or Mastery (dial-down to confirm the new pattern is durable). A short paragraph keyed to your child's current phase explains what's happening at this stage.
Summary. Four numbers — sessions completed, total practice time, average score (0 to 100, higher means more time with lips sealed during sessions), and a trend marker (rising, holding, or falling). The trend compares the early sessions in this period with the recent ones.
Score trend over time. A small line chart, one point per session, from the start of the period to the end. The shape matters more than the absolute height — a rising line means the work is paying off; a flat-at-the-top line means your child is consistently doing well; a falling line is the cue for a conversation about what's changed.
Performance by modality. If your child has done different activities (video, reader, games), this small table breaks down how each one is going. Sometimes the breathing improves faster with one type of content than another — this is how you'd see that.
Behavioural signals. Two short paragraphs and a small set of numbers. The first paragraph is about compliance prompts — when the app gives your child a cue to close their mouth, how do they respond? Two numbers matter: how quickly they close (response speed) and how long they hold the seal afterwards before the next event (the consolidation signal — the path from "closing when reminded" to "the closed state being the default"). The second paragraph is about camera framing — was the device positioned well, did your child stay in view, etc. Mostly a setup-quality check, but also a postural signal in its own right since screen distance and head position are part of the same picture that the breathing work targets.
What this shows. A plain-language read of the numbers above. Three to four short observations, each starting with a › marker. These are descriptive, not diagnostic — they tell you what the data appears to show, not what to do about it. The clinician's notes (below) and the conversation you have together are where interpretation becomes action.
Practitioner notes. A few sentences your clinician adds before sending the report. This is the most personal part — it's where the data meets your specific child.
Closing line. A brief encouragement — because the work, on most days, doesn't feel like much is happening, and a small reminder that it's adding up matters.
Your clinician decides the cadence. Reports are typically generated at meaningful moments — the end of a phase, after a chunk of sessions, or on a regular schedule (weekly or monthly) you agree on together. You can also ask your clinician for a report at any time. The clinician has a more detailed clinical version of the data that they use for their own reading; the version you receive is the one designed to be read by you.
The first weeks are likely to feel like nothing is happening. That's normal. Baseline is supposed to feel like nothing is happening — measurement is invisible by design. Practice is gentle by design. You won't see dramatic moments; you'll see slow trend.
Around week three to four, you may start to notice your child's mouth closing on its own when they didn't used to. They probably won't tell you about it. You may notice it during meals, during reading, in moments where the screen isn't even involved. When this starts, the therapy is working.
By month two or three, most children have substantially reorganized their default. By month four, the contingency in the app is doing less and less work because the child no longer needs it.
You should reach out to your clinician if:
Nasal is designed as a layered experience. Your child won't encounter all of it on day one. As they progress through the phases, the app introduces new elements at the right moments:
A gentle breathing reminder. A soft, friendly chime that arrives at intervals during sessions, prompting a small ritual: tongue up, lips together, breathe through the nose. Not a correction — a recurring moment, calm and brief.
A tongue-posture check. A quick yes/no question during sessions: "Is your tongue fully on the palate?" This isn't a quiz. It's a self-regulation practice — over time, your child shifts from noticing-and-correcting to already-correct, and that shift is what tells your clinician the skill has consolidated.
Beyond screen time. Eventually, the app can run during quieter activities like drawing, building, or reading. It can also watch your child while they watch TV: prop the phone on a stand, point the camera at the couch, and the app monitors in the background just as it would during a structured session. The kid does what they were going to do anyway. This is how the skill transfers from "during a Nasal session" to "in life."
Each of these arrives only when your child is ready for it. Your clinician decides the pace. You don't need to anticipate them — you'll see them when the time is right.
The most important thing you can do for this therapy is the thing you've probably been told never to do: step back. Stop reminding. Stop watching their mouth across the dinner table. Stop the small interventions you've been making for months or years.
Trust that the app is doing the work. Trust that the cumulative, daily, contingent feedback is reaching your child even when nothing dramatic is visible. Trust that your child is more aware of their own body than they're letting on, and that the awareness is growing whether or not you can see it.
Your job is to be the parent. Nasal will handle the rest.