Stop Snoring Exercises

Snoring is a surprisingly common problem. Everyone snores at some time to a lesser or greater degree and even animals can snore in their sleep. In some cases it is nothing to worry about and may simply be a result of overindulging in alcohol or incorrect sleeping posture. In other cases it is an indication of a more serious problem, and may lead on to serious medical problems, not to mention being kicked out of bed every night so your partner can get some sleep.

The cause of snoring is reasonably well known. The airway is narrowed and the snoring sound is produced(mostly due to vibration of loose tissue in the rear of the throat). This article doesn’t spend much time on that, but rather addresses ‘the causes of the cause’ as suggesting widening your airways as a solution to snoring does not really help anyone. Understanding what causes the airway to narrow in the first place is much more useful in looking for solutions to your snoring problem and consequently improving your health, your sleep and in all likelihood your relationship.

There are a number of causes which are beyond our control. These include:

• Genetics - Snoring can be genetic, namingly you can inherit a narrower than normal throat which will increase the likelihood of snoring.
• Age - Age will often decrease the muscle tone in your neck and consequently narrow your throat. Generally being middle aged or older is likely to increase your chances of a snoring problem.
• Gender - Sorry - but if you are a man you are more likely to snore. Men naturally have narrower air passages.
• Allergies - Including colds, sinus infections and asthmatics. All of these cause breathing problems which will block the nasal airway and make breathing more difficult. The resulting vacuum in your throat leads to noisy breathing.

There is very little that can be done about any of these situations, although generally staying in good shape and health will lead to a better muscletone around the neck and throat and minimize the effects of a smaller air passage.

There are a number of other identified causes that do fall within out area of control:

• Control your weight and shape - Any excess weight and any fatty tissue around the neck will lead to a narrower air way. Poor muscle tone is more likely to mean relaxed muscles, and overly relaxed throat muscles are likely to result on snoring.
• Smoking - Being a smoker, or living with smokers and inhaling a large amount of second hand smoke both relaxes muscles and creates congestion in the lungs and nasal passage.
• Alcohol and Drugs - Excessive drinking and use of some drugs can result in relaxation of the throat and tongue muscles, making snoring more common.
• Watch Your Sleeping Posture - Sleeping on your back is more likely to relax the throat, block the airways and result in snoring.

These factors are important to understand, because by seeing what causes the problem, the solution will tend to present itself.

Here are some true stories about sleep apnea side effects.

In 1959, a disc jockey named Peter Tripp went without sleep for 200 hours to raise money for the March of Dimes. After about five days without sleep, he began to experience hallucinations-believing that somebody’s tweed suit was made of worms and that flames were coming out of a drawer. He managed to do his daytime broadcast, but felt that he was in danger at night. After 200 hours of sleeplessness, he slept for 13 hours and felt much better. After a few nights of extended sleep, he was essentially back to normal, except that he reported slight feelings of depression for several months.

In 1964, Randy Gardner, a 17-year-old high-school senior, tried to establish a new record of 260 sleepless hours as a project in his local science fair. He became irritable after about the fourth day, but he retained many skills-after 230 hours of sleep loss, he still was able to hold his own on a pinball machine with sleep researcher Dr. William Dement, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Stanford University.

Several laboratory experiments have involved sleep deprivation for long periods and the sleep apnea side effects. It was found that a person’s mood deteriorates first-joy disappears-and the person becomes very sleepy and grim. After about two or three days, most people start having minisleeps, little lapses of attention when the brain goes to sleep for only five or ten seconds and wakes right up again. By about five days, these minisleeps become longer and more numerous. By ten or eleven days, the minisleeps are so numerous and so mixed with wakefulness that you can’t tell whether you are awake or asleep. You can talk, and in the middle of talking have two or three slow waves of sleep. You can walk, and from one 5tep to the next you might catch a second of sleep.

If you are given a task to do yourself, such as adding a column of numbers, the minisleeps may occur without your being aware of them.

However, if you are given a paced task-for example, if someone calls out numbers to you that you have to add-you may make many mistakes, because for the few seconds of minisleep, you don’t hear the numbers.

Many adults obtain less than optimal sleep, and some have a sizable sleep debt. Like gamblers playing with borrowed money, many sleep-deprived persons live in the red of lost sleep, often compromising their responsibilities at their jobs, sometimes using drugs for temporary energy. Most employees, even in crucial jobs, are forced to keep going all day no matter how fatigued they are. What if such sleep-deprived persons are dealing with the safety of an airplane? What if they are driving a semi-trailer down a crowded highway? What if they are making a military decision pivotal to war or peace?

If you are suffering from sleep apnea side effects there is help. What you need is an overall program that will cover all aspects of your day-to-day life so that you can gain a handle on it and regain your full, natural, sleep filled nights again.

Looking for a sleep apnea cure in Illinois? There are many remedies, some that work, some that do not. Read on to learn about the effects of losing sleep and what can be done about it.

What Happens When You Don’t Get Enough Sleep?

Missing one night’s sleep is not that bad for your body. If you are giving a speech the next morning, starting a new job, catching a plane, or starting a vacation, it is only natural to have difficulty sleeping the night before, but the excitement of the next day’s activities almost always counteracts any effects of the loss of sleep.

The main effect of a poor night’s sleep, or even two or three, is that you just get very sleepy. You also lose motivation for doing work or anything else but sleeping; it is difficult to pay attention to tasks, especially if they are boring; and your reaction time is somewhat slowed. Monotonous activities such as driving can be risky. So there are some effects, but they usually aren’t critical.

When looking for a sleep apnea cure in Illinois you should know that for most jobs, performance is not affected by one night’s lost sleep. However, making crucial judgments or doing creative thinking can be more difficult, and if a job is extremely boring, there is a decrease in performance even after the loss of just two hours of sleep on one night. Dr. Robert Wilkinson, of Cambridge, England, showed this by working with army recruits. He had them do some very boring work-such as crossing out the letter A in a series of words-for many hours a day after losing different amounts of sleep. Even a loss of only two hours of sleep had an effect. But most of our tasks aren’t so boring and, especially in an emergency, adrenaline keeps us going efficiently the next day and makes UD for lost sleep.

If you are forced to engage in an activity such as driving after sleep deprivation, you are in much more danger than usual because you are not as attentive or as careful in your judgment, and you might doze off.

When spending an entirely sleepless night-because of an emergency, for example-we may feel most sleepy around the “trough” of the 24-hour cycle, around 4 or 5 in the morning. Then, if we continue to stay awake, we usually get a second wind at about 8, 9, or 10 in the morning and function relatively well again during that day.

Missing sleep on a chronic basis may be a different story. After several nights without sleep, performance does go down, and you have more trouble concentrating and remembering numbers.

Looking for remedies for sleepiness? Start with smoking!

Often where there’s smoking, there’s insomnia.

Nicotine can keep you awake. It’s a stimulant, just as caffeine is. So if your habit is to light a cigarette when you are unable to sleep, you may want to change your habit. Pick up a book instead - you’ll have the added benefit of decreasing the hazard of fire, since you won’t be smoking in bed as you try to fall asleep.

A number of studies have provided clear evidence that cigarette smoking causes sleep difficulties. In fact, insomnia ranks near the top of things smokers complain about. Smokers have greater difficulty falling asleep because cigarettes raise blood pressure, speed up the heart rate, and stimulate brain-wave activity. Smokers also tend to wake up more in the middle of the night, possibly because their bodies are experiencing withdrawal symptoms.

Experiments by Dr. Anthony Kales and his team at Pennsylvania State University showed that when a group of men who had smoked from one to three packs of cigarettes a day for at least two years stopped smoking, they fell asleep faster and woke less during the night. Their improvement occurred despite daytime cigarette-withdrawal symptoms of temporary irritation, tension, fatigue, and restlessness.

So if you are a smoker, deciding to quit cigarettes might very well be remedies for sleepiness and help to cure your insomnia, as well as help you live longer.

Test this for yourself if you wish, although it’s logical to be a non-smoker even if it has nothing to do with your poor sleep. When you have decided on the date to become a nonsmoker, start taking extra vitamin and mineral supplements rich in B vitamins, vitamin C, calcium, and magnesium to help with the tension; and lay in a supply of fruit juice, chewing gum, carrots, celery, popcorn, and other snacks to help you through the first rough days. Then make the big move. Stop smoking for a month, and see if your sleep improves.

Other remedies for sleepiness: Stay away from smokers; when you crave a cigarette, substitute a walk swim, bike ride, or other rhythmic exercise; buy a brand of cigarette that you hate and if you must have a cigarette, have one of those. Pledge to yourself to especially avoid smoking the waking up, the hour after finishing a meal, or the hour before going to bed-the times when smokers most often light up. It also helps to make a list of why you want to be a nonsmoker and look at it every day.

Some people can quit with just these measures, but for many people, the rate of success is better with professional help. You may want to consult with your physician, a psychologist or other therapist, or try a stop-smoking program or workshop recommended by your physician.

The first few days may make your sleep worse, since you could have nicotine-withdrawal symptoms. But don’t make your decision about the sleep effects of not smoking until you have done it for at least a month. Use your Sleep Log and think very carefully about whether you are having better sleep without cigarettes.

Most patients seeking remedies for sleepiness have excellent improvement in sleep when they become nonsmokers, and the improvement is even more dramatic when they also cut down on caffeine and alcohol. And the other health benefits are a wonderful extra bonus.

Get some sleep tonight! There is an all natural cure program for overcoming insomnia or any other sleep disorder. Get the restful, peaceful, full nights sleep you deserve so you can get back to living a normal, happy life!

If you are an insomniac, there are three insomnia solutions you can do right away that will help you. No matter what other factors might be causing your poor sleep, you can do these things immediately and have an excellent chance of helping your sleep.

The three things: Reduce caffeine, limit alcohol, and eliminate smoking.

We know how difficult this can be, so we are not going to insist that everyone do it. Instead, we want you to investigate for yourself the effects of these three things on you.

In this article we will focus on reducing caffeine.

Insomnia Solutions: Reduce Caffeine

Research presented at the 1995 meeting of the Association of Professional Sleep Societies by Dr. Michael Bonnet, a researcher with the Dayton VA Hospital in Ohio, indicates that patients with insomnia typically have a 9 percent higher metabolic rate during both day and night than people who do not have insomnia.

Even though many insomniac patients feel lethargic and slowed down, their bodies act as if they are “hyped up.” When the metabolism of normal sleepers is increased to the same level by their drinking about four cups of normal coffee, the normal sleepers too experience insomnia. The message-most patients with insomnia are hyper aroused anyway, and adding coffee makes this condition worse. (Paradoxically, hyperactive children are often helped by caffeine.)

Caffeine and similar stimulants can cause many more problems than most people realize, and too much caffeine may be a factor in your insomnia. Often, insomniacs are so exceptionally sensitive to this stimulant that they may be unable to sleep after one cup of tea or a chocolate bar in the afternoon.

One study showed that patients who had caffeine-induced wakefulness cleared caffeine more slowly from their bodies. The concentration of caffeine in their blood was higher at midnight- eight hours after afternoon coffee-than it was in other people. Also, sensitivity to caffeine can increase with age. Even if you have had coffee, tea, or cola drinks in late afternoon or in the evening in the past with no trouble, they can start contributing to poor sleep as you get older.

Consuming more than 200 mg of caffeine a day (two cups of coffee, two or three colas, or several caffeine-containing pain tablets) is likely to affect sleep and create the danger of caffeine addiction. In some people, it takes much less–one cup of coffee at lunch or one cola in the afternoon.

So surefire insomnia solutions include reducing caffeine intake.