Snoring can have a major impact on a partner’s sleep. Photo / 123RF
It can disturb sleep, affect your health and drive a long-suffering partner insane, but with the help of the experts you can make a change.
I’m lying on my back, trying to form an “O” shape with my mouth and gulping down deep breaths like some kind of aquatic creature, as the gentle waters of the Mediterranean lap against the shore in the background.
“Now, force the breath out deeper and harder, but using your nose instead of your mouth,” urges Tom, my instructor. Tingles start around my face, resembling a slow massage, before slowly intensifying, spreading to my fingers and toes. Eventually my stomach tightens and constricts, an odd feeling, but one which Tom says is completely natural. Apparently I’m finally learning to relax my airways and use the full extent of my lungs.
I’ve come to ION, a music and wellness festival in Dhermi on the Albanian coast, for a week-long set of courses to try and learn how to breathe more effectively. For, like much of the UK adult population (according to YouGov, around 52 per cent of adults are regular snorers), I have developed a propensity for snoring, and breathwork – controlled breathing exercises to train the throat muscles, the diaphragm, and encourage nasal breathing during sleep – is thought to be one of the best ways of ensuring healthier and quieter sleeping habits.
“When we’re snoring, there can be an irregularity in our breath,” explains Sophie Arkana, a London-based breathwork and yoga teacher. “Whereas breathing with the diaphragm is really activating the full capacity of the lungs.”
Diaphragmatic breathing means that you are opening up the chest cavity, making it much easier to breathe naturally through your nose during sleep, lessening the likelihood of snoring. But the ability to breathe properly during our sleep is something which seems to go awry with age. While relatively few babies and children snore, this becomes a different story once we reach adulthood. Men are twice as likely to be noisy sleepers compared to women, in part because they have larger upper airways, creating a bigger space at the back of the throat for amplifying snores.
Why is this? Guy Leschziner, professor of neurology and sleep medicine at King’s College London and author of The Secret World of Sleep, explains that when we go to sleep, the muscles in the walls of our airways relax, which can result in soft tissue vibrating, creating the snoring sound. This becomes more common as we age because the muscles in our body become weaker and less toned.
“Lots of people say that they snore when they’re flat on their back,” says Leschziner. “The reason for that is because the tongue tends to move backward a little bit, sometimes the jaw retracts and that narrows the airway. And when the airway’s narrower and floppy, you’re more likely to get this reverberation of the soft tissues.” In some cases, snoring can reach up to 100 decibels, the same as a passing truck, and unsurprisingly, it can have a major impact on a partner’s sleep. Scientists from the Mayo Clinic in the US found that women get 13 per cent less sleep per night when their partner is snoring, something which can lead to deep resentment over time. One UK survey of 2,000 people found that 68 per cent were woken up by their other half snoring, while 12 per cent even cited it as a contributory factor for divorcing their partner.
While my own snoring is thankfully not quite truck-level, my long-suffering girlfriend Alice has been known to joke about sleeping in separate beds, which led me on a search for solutions. As well as breathwork, Leschziner recommends taking up singing as a way of honing the airway muscles, and avoiding drinking alcohol close to bedtime.
“Alcohol is a depressant of the central nervous system, so likely to accentuate the loss of muscle tone within the airway when you sleep,” he says.
Anti-snore pillows have also become increasingly popular in recent years, with brands such as Levitex, who work with a range of athletes to improve their sleep quality, unveiling a variety of models. Sleep posture expert James Leinhardt, founder of Levitex, explains that the main aim of anti-snore pillows is to provide more support for the head and encourage side sleeping.
“The biggest factor in tackling snoring is as simple as focusing on our sleeping position,” he says. “Back sleepers are more affected as the chest is under the most pressure in this position. Sleeping on your side can help reduce your chance of snoring as it creates an opening in your airways which helps you breathe more easily.”
But it is not just your relationship which can be affected by snoring, it can be your health as well. Snoring is a continuum, ranging from mild to the most extreme form where the muscles in the back of the throat collapse to such an extent that your breathing actually stops and starts during sleep. This is known as obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and research has shown that it affects up to 10 per cent of middle-aged adults.
Because this condition causes the level of oxygen to drop in your blood, science is increasingly showing that if OSA is occurring regularly, it can make you far more prone to developing a range of chronic illnesses.
Earlier this month, researchers from Uppsala University revealed findings from a five-year study on more than 62,000 Swedes. It showed that the low-oxygen environment from OSA had the ability to fuel the growth of tumours, as well as causing a steady loss of brain cells, putting them at heightened risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease and dementia.
A separate study also found that people experiencing OSA were more likely to develop blood clots, which can trigger heart attacks or stroke. While a further meta-analysis of 17 studies found moderate to severe OSA significantly increased cardiovascular risk, in particular stroke risk.
Ning Ma, a researcher at the University of Sheffield studying sleep apnea, says that some cardiovascular disease specialists are beginning to ask their patients about their sleep due to the growing connection between these diseases and sleep disorders. “There’s an increased risk of stroke, high blood pressure, and heart attacks if you have obstructive sleep apnea,” says Ma. “It’s one of the most likely underlying causes.”
However, people are often unaware that this is even occurring during their sleep. Ma says that if you wake up feeling breathless, that is a critical sign that something is awry, while Leschziner points to abnormal symptoms such as feeling excessively sleepy during the day, waking up repeatedly with a dry mouth or headache, or needing to frequently get up at night to go to the toilet.
“One of the side effects of these obstructive events is that they cause your kidneys to produce more urine at night,” says Leschziner.
Ma and colleagues have developed the SoundSleep app which enables people to monitor their breathing while they sleep, and detect signs of breathing abnormalities or sleep apnea without needing to seek an appointment at a sleep clinic.
The team are looking to extend the AI technology so the app can predict whether a sleep apnea event is about to occur within the next thirty seconds. This could enable the app to intervene and nudge the user to shift to a different sleep position and prevent sleep apnea altogether.
“Before the sleep apnea happens, your breathing becomes shallower,” says Ma. “So you could be wearing a sensor connected to the app which then gives you a small electric shock, to nudge you into changing body position to avoid this issue.”
But for anyone concerned about their snoring, one of the main pieces of advice which sleep scientists offer is to lose weight. People who are overweight are much more prone to snoring and sleep apnea because of excess body fat in the neck which can narrow the airways.
Leschziner says that while some degree of snoring is perfectly normal and won’t necessarily affect your health, it is important to take steps to try and minimise the extent of it, because of the many risks which can come from sleep apnea.
“If you’re having obstructive events, then that can also have risks associated with it because sleep seems to have a very important function in regulating how our brains work,” he says. “There are certain stages of sleep that we think are more important for certain housekeeping tasks of the brain. And if you’re disrupting your sleep as a result of these repetitive obstructive events, then that can influence these roles within the brain. And we think it may put you at increased risk of conditions like dementia.”
But snoring is very treatable as long as you stay persistent. While a week of breathwork classes was not quite sufficient to make a significant dent, anti-snore pillows have so far made quite a difference for me. According to Alice, I have been a more peaceful night-time companion over these past few weeks, so hopefully I can avoid the future fate of being banished to the sofa.
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