Avoid These Snoring Causes
Snoring is a troublemaker. It wrecks your sleep without you even realizing it. It makes your partner struggle between the choice of either spending a sleepless night with loud snoring sounds reverberating through his/her ears, or planting a knee blow in your gut to wake you up and order you to sleep on the couch. Then, you spend the next morning feeling drowsy, struggle through the day with a lingering sense of fatigue, come back at night and repeat the cycle.
Snoring causes and solutions
Is there anything you can do to simply fix the issue? Or is this your future?
You could keep on faithfully repeating the cycle and slowly make a mess of your life, or you could read on, understand the causes of snoring, and take the best measures to get rid of it.
Obesity
People with excessive fat deposits on their bodies invariably tend to snore more often and louder than their slimmer buddies. Particularly, fat concentration around the throat aggravates existing symptoms of snoring. Fat in the throat region causes the effective airspace between throat and nose to constrict, which in turn causes loud snoring sounds.
Not that it isn’t something worth worrying about in itself, but consider serious efforts to curb your obesity problem for the sake of your sleep.
The solution: Eat less, move your muscles, and include throat muscle toning exercises in your fitness regimen.
Pre-sleep Alcohol Consumption
Alcohol causes your throat muscles to relax (wait, isn’t that good, you ask?). Because of this, your throat muscles are not able to participate in the natural defenses that your brain activates upon sensing obstruction in the airway between your throat and your nose. The result – snoring.
The solution: It’s obvious, stop consuming alcohol before you sleep!
Your Sleeping Posture
What if you came to know that you could cut your snoring by 70-80% just by improving the posture you sleep in. Many people snore because they sleep on their back with their heads falling back. This posture causes your tongue to fall back on the base of your mouth cavity.
Thus, the air coming from the back wall of your throat has very little space to flow. This, again, causes airway constriction which in turn causes snoring.
The solution: Sleep on your side for a week and ask your partner if the snoring reduces.
Nasal Problem
The origin of your snoring woes might be in your nose. Some people have naturally stuffy noses, some suffer from nasal infirmities such as a deviated septum (the soft bone separating your nostril being tilted, reducing the size of one nostril), and some snore when they suffer from a cold.
The core problems are the same in all these cases – the width of the effective air passage is reduced, which causes the irritating sound when you breathe while asleep.
The solution: Take a hot water shower before sleeping to get a fresh feeling. Use a nasal strip to clear clogging from your nose. If this doesn’t help then look out for other options that include devices and mouthpieces.
Your Mouth Anatomy
Just like your nose, your mouth’s natural anatomy could be causing snoring. Particularly for people with a thick soft palate (the back part of the insides of your mouth’s roof), snoring is pretty common, because there’s very little space left for air to pass through unobstructed.
Also, if your uvula (the soft tissue hanging from the back of your mouth’s insides) is longer than usual, the problem of snoring could be aggravated. The sense of vibrations in the mouth, when you’re sleeping and snoring, is also aggravated.
The solution: Seek consultation from your physician, ascertain that your snoring problem is directly linked to your mouth’s anatomy, and explore surgical correction procedures.
Obstructive Sleep Apnea
Often, snoring is an indication of a deeper problem with your body. Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is one such condition. This is a condition where a person’s throat tissue blocks the mouth’s air passage completely. Because of this, breathing can stop completely for some seconds.
Loud snoring is a symptom of OSA. People who suffer from OSA often wake up with a start, making a snorting sound. OSA could cause breathing to stop for almost five times per hour of sleep.
The solution: Consult with your physician and seek continued medical support to combat OSA, because it could put you at increased risk of cardiovascular diseases.
Wrap-Up
A good night’s sleep can rejuvenate you like nothing else. However, your snoring won’t let that happen for you, or your partner.
Instead of accepting it as a daily compromise, avoid these snoring causes and understand the causes of snoring applicable to you, and then pursue long-term and permanent solutions to them for a snoring-free life.
