What is Oral Posture?

Oral posture is a term used to describe the position of your mouth, and in particular, the position of your lips and tongue.

At rest, with proper oral posture, your lips are sealed and your tongue rests on the palate. This necessitates nasal breathing, which is how you want to breathe at rest and during sleep. Nasal breathing is essential for stable upper airway function and oral health.

Mouth Breathing: Poor Oral Posture

Mouth breathing is a result of poor oral posture. During sleep it is associated with snoring, xerostomia, and airway instability. During the day, persistent mouth breathing is also associated with systemic physiological consequences as well as oral health problems such as increased risk for dental caries due to oral drying and microbial imbalance.

The Cause of Poor Oral Posture

The causes of poor oral posture and habitual mouth breathing are multifactorial, including craniofacial development patterns, muscular insufficiency, allergies, illness, and structural nasal obstruction such as nasal valve collapse or septal deviation.

How To Fix Oral Posture

Mouth breathing is a symptom of poor oral posture. Because of the negative consequences of mouth breathing, numerous therapies have attempted to restore nasal breathing without addressing oral posture in its totality.

Mouth tape, for example, forces the lips sealed; however, it can irritate the skin and lips and often fail in the presence of perspiration, facial hair, or salivary moisture. Further, it doesn't help provide keep the tongue resting on the plate.

Oral devices used to treat snoring, a symptom of poor oral posture, are often bulky, significantly increasing the vertical dimension of occlusion (VDO), and thereby preventing full lip seal and proper tongue posture against the palate. 

The key to fix oral posture is getting both lip seal and tongue-palate seal.

The SnoreSealer: A Remedy for Oral Posture

In searching for a solution to help my patients achieve proper oral posture, I realized no such solution existed.

There was a dire need for a simple, comfortable intraoral device that reliably achieved lip closure and facilitated a tongue-palate seal. I got to work.

After much research and development, I created the SnoreSealer. It's an intraoral device with a thin vestibular lip shield with thin occlusal shelves specifically designed to facilitate proper oral posture achieving lip seal and tongue-palate sealing. 

It's sleek design enables it to conform to your natural dental arch and achieve a natural lip seal. Then, after insertion and closing your lips, you simply swallow, which creates a natural vacuum suction from the evacuation of air from the oral vestibule. This mild suction encourages the tongue–palate seal.

In this manner, the SnoreSealer maintains lip competence, prevents mouth breathing, and promotes nasal breathing.

Oral Posture: Daytime

During the day, proper oral posture and nasal breathing can help train proper oral posture during sleep when you can't consciously control your lip and tongue posture. Further, maintaining proper oral posture and nasal breathing during the day can reduce sympathetic (fight or flight) tone and help you relax, focus, and feel better.

You can use the SnoreSealer during the day to train proper oral posture. 

Oral Posture: Nighttime

During the night, proper oral posture and nasal breathing can stop snoring and improve sleep, leaving you better rested with more energy, health, and wellbeing.

You can sleep with the SnoreSealer to help maintain proper oral posture, and stop snoring and sleep better.

Oral Posture: Summary

Oral posture refers to the resting position of the lips and tongue, with ideal posture meaning lips sealed and tongue against the palate, which promotes nasal breathing and supports airway and oral health.

Poor oral posture, most commonly seen as mouth breathing, is linked to snoring, dry mouth, dental decay, and broader physiological issues. 

Existing solutions such as mouth tape or bulky oral devices often fail because they don’t address both lip seal and tongue-palate seal together.

The SnoreSealer was developed to solve this gap: a thin, comfortable intraoral device that conforms to the dental arch, creates a natural lip seal, and uses gentle suction to encourage the tongue against the palate.

By restoring proper oral posture, it prevents mouth breathing and promotes nasal breathing. Used during the day, it helps train healthy posture and calm the nervous system; used at night, it reduces snoring and improves sleep quality.