Last summer on a farm in Victoria I accompanied a friend to a breathing workshop. “I know how to breathe! I’ve been doing it since I was born,” I protested as I trudged past cowpats and hay bales, breathing like a pro. “This guy has nothing to teach me!”

I was a breathing sceptic. Who needed to be taught how to breathe? Isn’t breathing as natural as … breathing? It sounded like baloney.

What will they monetise next? Other bodily functions like walking? Or sitting? Or even (to be base) … shitting and pissing?

My imagination went into overdrive as we and 20 others lay on the ground in a circle. Maybe I could start offering learn-to-walk classes. Tell people they’d been walking wrong all their lives … You do it like this: one foot, in front, of the other.

It was twilight, which quickly became night, and our breath, which started as even and quiet, soon became loud and rhythmic.

The breathing instructor conducted each inhale and exhale like an orchestra.

Inhale for eight counts, hold it in for four, exhale for six, repeat. Another one was fast, hard breathing, moving your diaphragm in and out like a bellows.

After 40 minutes of this I felt … incredible. I was euphoric.

Was I high?! High on my own air supply?!

As long as humans have been able to breathe, they’ve been able to move, disrupt, play with and manipulate breath.

It turns out breath isn’t just breath, but a powerful force that interacts with the nervous system and can be hacked to interact with other systems in the body in surprising ways.

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Last month I went to Bali to start training to become a meditation teacher. Part of the course was learning about breath.

Everyone was raving about a book called Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by the US journalist James Nestor.

The basic premise of Nestor’s bestselling book is that modern humans in the industrialised west are breathing wrong. Instead of breathing through our noses we are breathing through our mouths, which can cause or contribute to crooked teeth, shrunken jaws, sleep apnoea, fatigue, poor immune systems, allergies and decreased lung function.

Nestor advises a simple fix to stop mouth breathing at night – just tape your mouth shut!

To date, there haven’t been any clinical studies done to prove this technique treats any underlying health condition, but Nestor’s book is a great read on how important nasal breathing is to our overall health.

When I returned from the meditation teacher-training course I decided to avoid breathing through my mouth unless I was talking or shovelling in food.

While I was able to be conscious of mouth breathing during waking hours (and shocked at how often I would just walk around with my mouth hanging open like a fairground clown), it’s harder to maintain when you are asleep.

Maybe it was time to tape my mouth shut at night. All I had at home was silver gaffer tape. Ouch! I used it to hold together broken furniture but putting it on my face was horrible. Ripping it off removed several layers of skin.

I tried masking tape but it was not strong enough. I needed something strong but gentle – so I settled on an adhesive bandage.

TikTok has tutorials on how to tape your mouth, which is good, because on that first night I was going to tape it across ways – along the length of my lips – like Merlin Luck did in the 2004 season of Big Brother after being evicted from the house, holding a Free the Refugees sign.

Not that it really mattered how I did it. In bed, trying to go to sleep, I had the adhesive bandage on for all of 20 minutes when it started to annoy me. How could I sleep with this thing on my mouth? It was so irritating. It felt wrong.

Each night followed much the same pattern. I’d be about to fall asleep, reach for the tape and scissors, put a bit of tape on my lips, and then suddenly be wide awake and irritated. The clock would pass midnight and I’d be there awake, looking like a hostage (but in a bizarre twist, I had taken myself hostage), until I ripped the tape off and went to sleep.

Yet still I persisted. I stayed at a number of houses this week, bringing my wretched mouth tape with me.

“It’s disgusting,” said my brother as I was leaving the next day. “I bet I find heaps of tape with slobber all over it under the bed.”

It was true. There was tape with slobber on it under the bed.

The longest I have managed to keep the tape on so far is an hour. In that hour, I lay sleepless, tired, irritated, alert, the primal alarm system in my body ringing – refusing to allow someone who is bound and unable to fully breathe go to sleep.

It will take a while to unlearn the habits of a lifetime.