Snoring can cause you (and your partner) to lose sleep on a regular basis. The lack of quality rest can cause stress and mood swings, impatience and irritation.
“Thou dost snore distinctly. There’s meaning in thy snores.” (The Tempest 2:1:195-196).
In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Antonio and Sebastian plotted murder between the snores of their companions. Thankfully, the majority of us aren’t under threat with every rise and fall of breath… not immediately anyway. As time goes on, the average snorer will likely find themselves threatened by poor sleep, irritability, angry partners, not to mention the physical symptoms. Believe it or not, snoring is risky business.
Snoring can cause you (and your partner) to lose sleep on a regular basis. The lack of quality rest can cause stress and mood swings, impatience and irritation. Bright lights and loud sounds become intrusive and unwelcome. You find yourself lacking energy and feeling unproductive during the day. Snoring causes a lack of sleep, which causes a whole host of other problems in your social, romantic and professional life. Loud snoring is also the third most common reason people cite for divorce!
Besides the personal impacts on your life, snoring significantly affects your physical health. Research has found links between snoring and sleep apnoea, heart attacks and strokes. Wounds and illnesses take longer to heal too. Lack of sleep can also cause poor attention span, lack of concentration, poorer memory retention, dry mouth, morning headaches, lower blood oxygen levels. It’s not just how often you snore, but how loudly as well. The louder your snore, the bigger the risk.
As well as impacting the quality of sleep and mental stability, interrupted sleep impacted the births of a large proportion of expectant mothers. Many women who slept poorly had more pauses in breathing and were more likely to need an emergency caesarean section. Good sleeping habits are critical for expectant mothers, and snoring during later parts of pregnancy is a real indicator of other health issues.
If you’re quite far along in your pregnancy, you should keep a close watch on your sleeping patterns. Around 80% of all expectant mothers find themselves having difficulty sleeping in their last trimester. Those who suffered from snoring and disrupted sleep were significantly more likely to develop depression as well as display restless leg syndrome or sleep apnoea.
Expectant mothers aren’t the only ones who display increased risks of depression as an indirect result of snoring. Constant low quality sleep due to snoring leads to the increased likelihood of developing depression and sleep apnoea. According to a study published by Journal Sleep (2008) if you snore, you’re a third more likely to suffer from a heart attack, 67% more likely to have a stroke and develop sleep apnoea (50%).
So, let’s look at what causes this lack of sleep. During your sleep cycle, you need a certain amount of time in each stage: rapid eye movement (REM) helps rest and repair your body, as well as regulate hormones that give you that “full” feeling after eating. Snoring disrupts your sleep cycle and actually makes it harder to lose weight for this very reason.
Snoring obstructs the airways, preventing a steady and easy flow of oxygen to your brain. If you’re snoring, you’re not able to get enough oxygen flowing for REM. If you don’t get enough REM, you can find yourself feeling drowsy, losing concentration, forgetting things and overeating regularly.
Sometimes, reducing your snoring can be a matter of losing a bit of weight, but in other cases, the cause might be a genetic problem or a result of genetics, age or asthma. While surgery is a drastic way to eliminate snoring, the most common and widely cited way to alleviate symptoms are tested snore remedies like Snorepro.
Now, while Antonio and Sebastian are just “such stuff as dreams are made on,” (The Tempest 4:1:157-158) they weren’t wrong when they said that snores had meaning. A snore, whether it be loud or soft, says a lot about your state of health, and has huge implications for your mental and physical wellbeing. Thankfully, snoring is an easy fix, as long as a Snorepro is within reaching distance!
