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Introduction to Karese Laguerre by Matt Feret [1:09]

Matt Feret:

Hello everyone. This is Matt Feret, author of Prepare for Medicare and prepare for Social Security Insider's, guidebooks, and online course training series. Welcome to another episode of The Matt Feret Show, where I interview insiders and experts to help light a path to successful living in midlife retirement and beyond. Karese, welcome to the show.

Karese Laguerre:

Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

Matt Feret:

Tell everybody what you do, how long you've been doing it, and how you help people.

Karese Laguerre:

Well, thank you for allowing me to introduce myself because I tend to have to explain what I do a lot. I am a myofunctional therapist. I'm sure you can't just walk down your block and find one. There's not many of us around. So what is it that we do? We are actually kind of like personal trainers, but for all the muscles below the eyes but above the shoulders. So in that wonderful region of muscles where there's over a hundred muscles that nobody ever thinks about, we are helping to optimize the function and coordinate those muscles. That way we can help people breathe better, sleep better, eat and digest, and otherwise be better in their overall lives. So I work with people of all ages to help overcome various issues such as whether it be tongue tie, sleep apnea, mouth breathing, which is the biggest one ever, teeth that are shifting inappropriately. You may have had multiple rounds of braces and your teeth keep shifting. People with gum disease, people with certain types of respiratory issues. I work with a wide spectrum of people who really could use a lot of muscular strength and awareness in that beautiful region below the eyes but above the shoulders.

Matt Feret:

Okay. So I know you said you had to explain it to a lot of people, but before we get into my questions about all the stuff you just said, how did you get into this? You're right, it's not a walk down to the corner doctor's park and find one. How did you get into this? How did you discover this?

The Purpose of Myofunctional Therapy [3:26]

Karese Laguerre:

So I actually got into it through my primary profession. I am a registered dental hygienist, so I'm licensed in two states and I was working with a pediatric dentist who actually brought it to my awareness through my children. So I'm a mother of four and my children had multiple issues, and all children do, right? My son had a lot of issues with impulse control, behavioral issues, attention focus, huge issues with that. We really struggled for many, many years. My oldest daughter had every sleep issue under the sun, you name it, for 10 years straight. We were guaranteed bedwetting every single night. But then outside of that, we had a lot of issues with sleepwalking, night terrors, blood curdling screams in the middle of the night, everything, everything. The grinding, the snoring, everything. We had all the things. My youngest two had a lot of issues too with their upper respiratory tract, so a lot of congestion, a lot of sinus inflammation, the ear infections and so forth. But all of that, that pediatric dentist actually exposed me to were surrounded by how they were utilizing these muscles in this area, how they were breathing, how they were eating, what was happening and how that was affecting their sleep and how that was impacting their growth and development. And so while, yes, I started with my children and it really was an awareness that was brought to me through my children. Those children grow up to be unhealthy adults. It compounds as you age, and so I found a lot of beauty in working with those who are older who now are experiencing the detrimental effects of never having that being addressed when they were young.

Matt Feret:

I know about massage; I think everybody does. I know about chiropractor work. I know about facials. I think my kids on TikTok will do the whole sinus drain thing on their upper cheekbones. But I've never thought at all the space between, what did you say? The top of your head and the top of your shoulders?

Karese Laguerre:

Below your eyes and right to the shoulders.

Matt Feret:

Okay, tell me what's in there and tell me what that stuff does in there that impacts all these things.

Karese Laguerre:

The most important group of muscles that are in there, there's multiple. I mean your jaw muscles are in there. Your muscles of facial expression, how you chew is in there, your mandible, a lot of different wonderful things are in there, but the most important one that actually winds up being the most impactful for multifaceted areas is the tongue. So the tongue, I know a lot of people mistakenly like to think of it as one large muscle. The tongue is actually more of like an organ. So the tongue is comprised of 16 different muscles that help to intubate it and have it do various movements. But this tongue, oh man, the tongue is actually how we are stimulating breathing. That's how we're regulating our autonomic nervous system, which is how we're able to do rest and digest or fight and flight. How we signal in between there and our tongue is definitely important for the stability of our oral cavity, like where your teeth are sitting, how your mouth develops, the stability and the function of such the tongue is the vital thing that is actually within that area.

Matt Feret:

Okay, so I know I'm going to ask silly questions, but fine, let's go with the tongue. What do I do with it that I haven't done for a long time? Can I exercise it? Can I work it out? Can I massage it? What do I do?

Karese Laguerre:

You absolutely can exercise your tongue. It's really important too. The first step is just knowing where your tongue is at rest. So when you're not using your tongue at all, here's where it should be at rest lightly suctioned up in the roof of your mouth. So it should be suctioned there to feel like it's almost a little bit connected. Like you would have to actually pull it down in order to get it to come down from the roof of your mouth. It should be the entirety of that tongue actually from the beginning, just beyond your two upper front teeth all the way through. So your soft palate, like where your uvula is, your tongue should be up and really supporting a scaffold against that palette or the roof of your mouth. Now here's a great way for you to try to test that. I know, I see you there trying

Matt Feret:

Oh, everyone listening and watching is doing the same thing that I'm doing right now. We're just looking up and trying to figure out where the heck my tongue is in relation to the roof of my mouth.

Karese Laguerre:

Exactly. So I want you to just be really hyper aware. We're going to put our feet flat on the ground. We're going to sit up nice and tall. We're going to take a deep inhale through our nose and just really process that breath, exhale and breathe it all out. Then you're going to inhale again and as you inhale, just be hyper aware. Where exactly is your tongue in your mouth as you prepare to do a nasal exhale?

Matt Feret:

Oh, a nasal exhale. Oh, let me try again. I was doing a mouth exhale… It is at the roof in my mouth.

Karese Laguerre:

It’s at the roof? Good job. Very, very good.

Matt Feret:

Think it's always there, but I've never thought about it.

Karese Laguerre:

That’s where it's supposed to be. That's how we stimulate. So the roof of our mouth is obviously the floor of our nose. It's the same bone that really structures both. We can contact our vagus nerve there, which regulates our autonomic nervous system, has to do a lot with our chemical balance, and we're able to really help facilitate a good bit of stability in our mouth with our tongue there. So if you found that your tongue is not resting up on the roof of the mouth, I mean if you're not as lucky as Matt and I, and you have your tongue up there and it’s maybe floating a little bit down in the middle, or it's resting all the way down on the bottom, or maybe half of the tongue is up but the other half isn't, it's all muscle comprised of organ and so, yay, hooray, we are actually able to exercise and work it out. And you can get those muscles to be more prominent and to be able to have the strength and awareness to sit up there. So yes, it's something you can work out. It’s not all is lost.

Matt Feret:

So if my tongue isn't where it's supposed to be, what happens then? I mean, what does it not do for me or why is the rest of my face or my breathing out of whack?

Karese Laguerre:

Well, you'll definitely have a lot of issues with the breathing. The breathing is going to be the number one thing that you'll probably see have an impact. What's going to happen is you won't be able to take as deep of a breath when your tongue is down or even if it's half up, half down, you've got a good portion of the tongue body down in your upper airway. So our tongue is really long. It can go all the way down C-five, C-six on the spine. I know you mentioned chiropractic a little bit earlier. So when the tongue is down and in that airway, it's obstructing some of the path. When the tongue is up and connected against the palate, the good portion of the body of the tongue is out of that airway, out of that throat area, and you're able to actually get a better breath in on top of the fact that that tongue, if it's not up against the nasal floor, which is the roof of the mouth, then it's going to not be able to stimulate nasal breathing as well. And so you won't be able to really get in as much oxygen from there as well. Your mouth is going to not really like that as much. Your saliva, you might not produce as much saliva in addition to the fact that your gum health overall with gum disease, a lot of links with that tongue not sitting where it's supposed to be or not being able to really engage in the oral cavity. Things will shift and move and you're more likely to experience bone loss.

Matt Feret:

By not having my tongue in the wrong place, we've got all these other issues.

Karese Laguerre:

Yes. Isn't it wild how the body is all connected?

Sleep Apnea and Tongue Placement [12:30]

Matt Feret:

Well, yeah, thanks for running me through that exercise. And you were talking about sleep apnea, I mean just like everybody else, we've seen these sleep apnea commercials and on TV now for I don't know what, 10, 15 years, and it seems like the older I get, the more people I hear like, yeah, I've got a CPA machine, and I can't sleep with it. Or now they can install one in your nose. What's the impact to sleep apnea of the tongue that you mentioned?

Karese Laguerre:

Okay, so the tongue, like I mentioned previously, we want it to be up and out of the airway. But the first thing that happens when we go into sleep is all the muscles start to relax. It becomes deeper as we get into various stages, but stage one, it begins to relax. Now you take your body, you lie it back. Now we have all the pressures of gravity. We have our muscles now all relaxed and our tongue and the body of the tongue falling backwards now because you're lying back, right? So tongue is falling back now into that airway space. Our muscles are relaxed now. There's no space. So, in obstructive sleep apnea, that obstructive part is all the muscles and the tongue closing that space. So that makes it more difficult for you to take a full nasal inhale.

Matt Feret:

Can you do this tongue exercise all day and help with that, or is it usually sometimes a combination of it if it’s obstructive sleep apnea, or do you have to resort to a CPA machine right away?

Karese Laguerre:

So all day is a little bit much. It's like if you want to get six pack abs, if you just did crunches all day, would that help? Probably not. It's a combination of things, right? Myofunctional therapy tends to work almost like Legos, where we have building blocks where we should isolate and strengthen any weakened muscles and then we're going to coordinate them and figure out what muscles are compensating because when you have muscles that aren't in function other muscles have to pick up and do the hard work. So now we're going to have to coordinate all the muscles, figure out how they're supposed to function appropriately, and then we habituate that so we start putting it into your daily life so that we can get new neuromuscular patterns. It’s definitely very similar to if you wanted six pack abs, you do have to get muscular development, but then you also have to reprogram how you're utilizing those muscles because it has to be a subconscious habit for you to maintain and stick it at night.

The CPA is phenomenal because it helps keep millions of people alive. What the CPA does, it stands for continuous positive airway pressure. And so essentially all that's happening is it is forcibly keeping open that airway by pushing air through. So it's just keeping what those muscles apart from each other and so being able to have strengthened muscles because remember I'm in this region above your shoulders, so strengthened muscles in the throat as well is going to help because when you lay back again, let's do another analogy. You lay back and let's imagine it's somebody who has a beer type belly or a more round belly, they lay back and everything starts to shift. That beer belly doesn't sit up tall, it shifts. Everything moves. You get somebody with six pack abs, you lie them back, those abs go nowhere. Those muscles are tight and to nothing is moving.

So once you have somebody who lays back with an airway that is more like the beer belly one with the muscles that are just super lax and everything's moving and mobile, well then we're not able to really sustain an open airway as compared to once you get some exercise and you're really working out these muscles and you're able to facilitate a more open and patent upper respiratory tract, that is how you get really good sleep. So you can have it forcibly open with the CPA or you can really strengthen and get the awareness in the muscles so that you're able to sustain it open naturally.

Matt Feret:

I know we've spent a lot of time on the tongue, and I know that there are other muscles in there, but I'm still the whole CPA, sleep apnea, tongue thing. It's not a fair question. How come I've never heard of this before? I had a guest on the show one time that says, it's like we always try to find the Howitzer when we're attacking the problem, when maybe a natural solution may work. Is this one of those instances?

Karese Laguerre:

Absolutely, absolutely. And I feel like there's a lot of money behind a lot of these things. So the CPA is something that you'd be dependent on for the entirety of your life. An oral appliance that you might get from your dentist for obstructive sleep apnea, another thing that you would be reliant upon for the rest of your life. Something happens, something breaks, you have to replace, you have to pay and get new ones and so forth. There's no money to be made when you start exercising and working out these muscles and don't have that problem. Where is the benefit there in the medical care system?

Matt Feret:

It should be with the patient, right? I mean first and foremost.

Karese Laguerre:

Exactly. So, I think personally, instead of addressing it in a way where we're putting a band aid over the issue by giving you something that you would need for the entirety of your life, it is better to address the root of the problem. And so, I don't know why it's such a big issue, but I assume there are some financial incentives involved.

Jaw Placement and Its Impact [18:37]

Matt Feret:

And probably some clinical ones too. I'm guessing it's like you said, it works for millions and millions of people, but it's a nice thought to put them through a natural way to do it first to try rather than pulling out the proverbial Howitzer. Alright, so how about this? I have a friend who a long time ago had serious, serious jaw pain due to stress and it came back every once in a while, like every five or six years, and I guess it was she figured it out it was stress related through her doctors or her physicians. Is that jaw muscle another one or is there a number two in terms of importance?

Karese Laguerre:

No, the jaw muscle is really, really important too. So jaw muscles, there are three different muscles there. So the temporalis, the medial and the lateral pterygoid muscles all do help to work the jaw. And when that jaw is not appropriately riding on the joint because it's like a ball and hinge joint and so it's got to swing appropriately and then when it doesn't, sometimes we get clicking, we get popping, we get muscles that are overactive and so they're working too hard and that's where we're firing all of the pain. People get tension headaches because of it or just oral facial pain or localized pain in that area. That's going to be our second biggest issue. So we try to downregulate some of these overactive and overdeveloped muscles. When the muscles are overactive and overdeveloped, that's when you really see the problem. So what you think is stress, or it might be stress that might induce it and cause you to clench or start to overuse those muscles.

Sometimes it's multifactorial where you might be chewing unilaterally, so you're using one side more than the other and overdeveloping those muscles and then on top of it you might clench and then that's now going to create a stimulus where this muscle group is on fire and you can't figure out why. Well sometimes we just have to rebalance. You're using the muscles in other capacities in addition to also downregulating it and downregulating where everything is at rest because again, at rest we want to have our tongue up, but our teeth should actually be apart. Your teeth should never touch each other unless you are actively chewing. That is the only time your teeth should touch. And so if your teeth are together at rest, that too is a problem.

Matt Feret:

I think you just told me I have a problem. So where am my teeth supposed to be when I'm resting and how do I control that?

Karese Laguerre:

Your teeth are supposed to be lightly apart and it is a practice conscious effort. It really is downregulating, your masseter muscles, your masseters are the ones that really fire when you have those teeth together or they're in a holding pattern once you have those teeth together. And so downregulating, those masseter muscles is going to be how we get those teeth to start to relax.

Matt Feret:

So if I'm sitting here talking to you, what am I supposed to be doing when I'm not moving my mouth? Where are my teeth supposed to be resting? When you're at the dentist, they'll say if you get your braces off or something, they'll go, oh, does anything hitting? They want to line up the teeth, right? I guess. I don't know.

Karese Laguerre:

That is not true at all. No, resting for the teeth is just slightly apart. It's really two to three millimeters apart, very small minor bits of space, but jaw should be lightly open.

Matt Feret:

And now everyone listening or watching is doing the same thing I'm doing. How do I rest my teeth when I'm not talking?

Karese Laguerre:

Relax?

Matt Feret:

I think I am, but my teeth are touching.

Karese Laguerre:

Ooh, no bueno.

Matt Feret:

It means I'm not relaxed.

Karese Laguerre:

Your facial muscles certainly aren't. They definitely are not.

The Origins of Dysfunctional Orofacial Placement [22:44]

Matt Feret:

Alright, now that I've got two new problems I didn't know I had before talking to you, what should I be concentrating on? Okay, you mentioned children in the beginning and through your own experience, and then if you've never had these things or had these thoughts, like I clearly haven't, what do you do now in midlife or older than midlife? Do you self-diagnose this stuff? How do I start to think about this stuff because I really haven't thought about that section of my body ever unless something hurt.

Karese Laguerre:

Absolutely. So it is something where you would have to kind of, when I meet somebody for the first time, I am always going back and looking at the entirety of the story. Where did all of these things begin? It could have begun as early as a birth trauma. Birth in and of itself we know is a trauma. If you know that you were born with forceps or vacuum delivery or sometimes if you were premature delivery, that's going to have an impact on a lot of the cranium and how those muscles will form and function later on. So this may have started from even before you were able to have a true influence on it through various habits and so forth. And then were you breastfed? Breastfeeding is the great way to get optimal oral function. So breastfeeding and being breastfed for as long as possible is phenomenal.

At least two years in helping you to develop proper oral rest posture really works the tongue. It gets all the muscles engaged, the jaws nice and relaxed. You're going to get good function as a result of that. What were some of your early oral habits? Did you thumb suck? Did you have a pacifier? We can look at a lot of that oral stuff now. Here's a good chunk of time I'm going to skip. Let's talk about your teens. Did you have braces then? Was there a need for that? Did you have to have headgear? A lot of people who had to have headgear, did you have teeth that were extracted and then you had braces because there wasn't enough room in your mouth for those teeth that's going to create an impact on that oral environment. Your tongue can't sit up there If they made your mouth smaller, well now there's no room for your tongue to sit up there.

And so that might be putting together some pieces for some people later on. You're looking at your life and the quality of your sleep. Have you always had a memory of having poor sleep? Have you never really been able to have a good night's sleep? Have you struggled for a good portion of your life from your twenties maybe on with your jaw and with having pain or with having discomfort? Have you had to wear night guards that way you could sleep without grinding those teeth because you feel like, I don't know, the dentist told you you needed it because you had too much stress. Stress is not a factor or grinding, especially at night. Stress is a daytime maybe factor, but if you're grinding away your teeth at night, you needed a night guard that's most likely an issue of oral facial dysfunction. A lot of what is the origins of this profession started very early in the 1900s with the man who was like the father of orthodontics who really wanted to know how come people weren't developing with teeth that are just in perfect occlusion.

That's a wonderful scientific question. Why are people not developing this way? And after many years of research, him and some other prominent dentists of that time in the early 1800s, by 1818, they had 50 papers published about muscle function and the impact on the cranium and how it does impact a lot of these different various aspects of our life and our health. And so you want to take a look at a good of your history, what's been going on with you and your skeletal system because health really is from the top down. Everything that happens in this wonderful area that nobody thinks about is critical to anything that's going on below. You can have a good diet, but if your oral facial function isn't going well, your digestive system will still be thrown off. You could be swallowing too much air, you could be swallowing appropriately, not breaking things down because the saliva is not being produced. That should actually help to break things down. And the first stage of digestion is actually in the oral cavity. So there's a lot that is impacted, but you got to look at the top down.

How to Improve Orofacial Health [27:26]

Matt Feret:

You went through that checklist and I went, yep, yep. Nope, nope, yep, nope, yep, nope. So alright, we'll do it a slightly different way. So don't use me as your example. So let's say I just went through that checklist. Now what do I do? Do I read? Do I go to my dentist? Do I talk to you? How do I even start? If I started listening to this show and didn't even know it was a thing and now I'm like, oh yeah, there could be some stuff in there as I'm reviewing my entire life. How can I improve the quality of my sleep? How can I improve my digestion? How can I improve all these things, even though it's been, well, let's say several decades since birth.

Karese Laguerre:

Step one, seek out some answers. So yes, you can see your dentist, you can consider seeing a myofunctional therapist. You can definitely consider seeing an ENT, an otolaryngologist or an ear, nose, throat doctor. So all of these are specialties where we're working with all that's in the upper respiratory system. So the ENT is a wonderful way to know if you even have the capacity for good nasal breathing. Even if your tongue's up there, you might not have good nasal capacity and so maybe there's an obstruction from the nose that you might need to have medically addressed. Then your dentist is a really great place because your dentist is working with the dental arches and that is what facilitates space for that tongue. If you don't have small narrow arches, you don't have space for your tongue. Great place to start is with your dentist because your dentist might have some great solutions for you.

A myofunctional therapist is who you contact after you've been like, oh, my dentist saw that I have enough space. Or my ENT says that I can breathe really well, but I just am unable to get my tongue up there. Well, I've got the wonderful personalized plan that we can go through to get you to our final destination. But if you're more of a DIY type of person, you just want to do it yourself. Just need some guidance as to what to do. My first step and my most important tactic, I say start a nasal hygiene routine. There are not enough people that are cleaning their nose. We clean literally all the other places of our body. We will go into our mouth, we will go into our ears, we'll go into other places, but we do not ever go in our nose.

Matt Feret:

Wait a minute, go. I mean, we know everybody cleans their nose, but I don't think they clean it the way you mean to clean it, right?

Karese Laguerre:

I think they blow their nose, which is blowing stuff out of it, but that's certainly not cleaning up in it.

Oh, with their finger. Oh no, that's certainly not clean.

Matt Feret:

I'm not saying I do. I'm just saying there are ways to clean your nose. Yeah, but what do you mean? I know you don't mean picking your nose. What do you mean?

Karese Laguerre:

I definitely mean like a saline rinse or an irrigation system. So some people use saline irrigation, might be like a neti pot where you're taking all of the liquid and it goes up one nostril and comes down and out. The other one that actually cleans the lining of your nasal cavity or the sprays or the mist. Not like a Flonase, but really like a saline. So that saline solution is actually going to cleanse out those passages and really help the lining of that flora so that you can breathe in and as you're breathing, you're optimally humidifying all of that air that's coming in because that's an essential function in order for us to be able to produce nitric oxide in our nose, which helps bind to the receptors, the oxygen, and then we're really getting it stimulated and going and we filter out all the air through our nose, and so if it's not clean, we're already at a deficit.

You're working at a loss, right? But on top of just cleaning it and having that nasal hygiene, it's really important to open up and to make sure that you can optimally use it. So if you want to use a nasal dilator or a strip, a nasal strip, either one nasal dilator is going to open up your nostrils from within a nasal strip is going to open up your nostrils from outside. This is going to be a game changer for anybody looking for better sleep nasal hygiene and opening up those passages. Here's why nobody talks about it enough, because again, I'm sure there's a lot more money to be made and a lot of other things, but your breathing is actually what helps you stimulate those sleep cycles better than anything else. So you can have the best mattress, you can have the best pillow, you can have the best of whatever sleep products are out there.

You can pop as much melatonin as you like. You will not get a good night of sleep if you are not breathing well because our body needs air. We can go weeks without food. We can go days without water. Not many of us, if any, can live for minutes without air. Air is our primary directive and if we are breathing poorly at night, our body stops all other restorative processes. There is no need for our immune system to try to do anything. Lymphatic drainage, absolutely. Why do any of that? Our person can't breathe. We got to focus on breathing so you don't get to stimulate your respiratory cycles and you get through those sleep cycles very, very poorly and rapidly and that's going to affect you the next day, the day after that day, after that day after that. We're actually in an epidemic, a worldwide epidemic, and I'm not talking about COVID, I'm talking about the World Health Organization declaring sleep, a global epidemic because 45% of the world's population, our global population suffers from sleep deprivation. We have to breathe better.

Matt Feret:

I mean I'm in that 45% have been for years. You see all this gray?

Karese Laguerre:

Yes,

Matt Feret:

That's it right there.

Karese Laguerre:

A lot of people are suffering.

Matt Feret:

So alright, the nasal thing. So this is all connected. These are all new things I should pay attention to and need to pay attention to, especially if I'm having sleep problems, especially if I'm having jaw tenderness and soreness and for oral hygiene and oral health, I've got challenges around that side, the grinding, the teeth, the inflamed gums, everything like that. We're talking tongue, jaw, and nose. Right?

Karese Laguerre:

Absolutely. Overwhelming, isn't it?

Matt Feret:

Yeah, it kind of is. I mean here I thought I just needed to make sure to eat correctly, organically, right? Use all my probiotics, take my vitamins, work out, take a walk, and now I got to do this too. I mean, I am not trying to be negative on it, I guess I never paid attention to it and like you said, no one does, but it's really important.

Karese Laguerre:

Exactly. You got to start thinking of health from the top down.

Matt Feret:

I like it. So if I'm looking, if I don't know, let's say I've got mom or dad or grandma or grandpa and they're having issues sleeping or issues with cognition or any type of issues. As people grow older, your typical person is going to go like, oh, it's natural course of aging, natural sign of aging. Some people might say, well, let's do some cognitive function tests, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Are there telltale signs that there's something amiss with the muscles that you've talked about that I can observe in someone else to explore those as well?

Karese Laguerre:

Not having your tongue in the proper posture. Snoring is definitely a big sign. So if you are a caregiver and you know that your person that you're caring for your loved one is snoring and it is a loud snore, if it is something where they start to gasp and they wake up in the middle, the sleep cycle, what's happening is it's getting detrimentally worse every single night. So there's a large link between dementia, Alzheimer's and poor sleep in stage three of sleep and in REM sleep, that's where our brain is actually depositing memories and that's where we're getting a lot of our cognitive restoration during that REM sleep. If you are not in that REM sleep and you're not getting adequate REM sleep, you're going to start seeing the signs very early on that something bigger is coming down the line if you do not start to address your sleep.

And so it's going to start looking like when you have these small things that you forget, you take your keys, you walk out to your car, and you've absolutely forgotten where exactly it is you were supposed to go and it's something small and you feel like, oh, well that was just that one thing that happened. I'm fine. And then it starts to build and it compounds, and then you think, oh, well I'm just getting older. Your sleep is just now catching up to you significantly. You can put a stop to it by improving and working on the sleep beforehand. So start working on some breathing exercises. Start working on actively addressing the issue. So whether that's visiting a dentist, a sleep physician, an ENT, but you need to start addressing the issue as early as possible because that is the biggest link to these memory and cognitive function disorders. Poor sleep.

Matt Feret:

Poor sleep, and you can get poor sleep by not paying attention to the right things in and around your face. Yes, this has been fascinating. I hope you can tell. This is mind blowing to me. I don't know how I've gone on this long in this life to not even think about it. And as soon as I saw the topic and saw you and started talking, I'm like, oh yeah, of course there's a million muscles in your face and here everybody's worried about their glutes or their biceps.

Never really thought about working my face out, but now I do. Now I'm going to sit here tonight and figure out where my tongue is all night. How many times a day should I think about where my tongue is?

Karese Laguerre:

All the time. I'm always thinking about it. I mean, I don't really have a need to think about it, that's just where it is. But I'm always talking to people about it and so I'm always thinking about it. So I think it is one of the corner keystones to health. Think about it all the time. All the time.

Matt Feret:

I think I just might. Karese, are there any questions that I didn't ask that I should have around this topic and all the stuff you're awesome at?

Karese Laguerre:

You asked some phenomenal questions. I really do think that there is a good bit of support in the dental community for a lot of these airway issues. However, you may or your listeners may come across a dentist who's just not as familiar or not as educated or doesn't feel as confident about the airway things. And so I would say that if you are kind of poo-pooed on the idea of looking at your tongue or they just don't have good answers for you, continue to advocate for yourself because there is nothing better than having a natural root cause solution to a problem that can either compound and get worse as you age, or that is already causing you a pain or discomfort. So advocate for yourself. The more you do, the better you'll get treated and serviced.

Matt Feret:

This has been great. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Karese Laguerre:

Thank you for having me.

Matt Feret:

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