In 2006, the BMJ published a test of the didgeridoo. Not a misprint.
Twenty-five adults who snored and had moderate sleep apnoea were split into two groups. One group took didgeridoo lessons and practised at home for four months. The other waited their turn. At the end, the players were less sleepy during the day, their breathing stopped less often in the night, and their partners reported less disturbed sleep.
That last part is the one nobody puts on the poster. Snoring is a problem with an audience. The person making the noise is often the last to know, and the person lying next to them is the one counting the hours.
Ahead, the ways to stop snoring naturally and what each did when it was tested: what is vibrating in your throat, the signs that snoring is more than noise, the four questions worth asking yourself, what fixing it did for the person in the other half of the bed, the tennis ball trick and how few people stick with it, what losing a tenth of your weight did to night-time breathing, the drink that turned ordinary snorers into something worse, the nasal strips that changed nothing, and the throat exercises that halved the noise.
What snoring is
Snoring is your throat flapping in the wind.
As you fall asleep, the muscles that hold your airway open relax. The soft palate, the uvula, the tongue and the walls of the throat sag a little. Air squeezing past them sets the loose tissue vibrating, and the vibration is the sound. The medical name for it is stertor, from the Latin stertere, to snore. Even the Romans needed a word for it.
Lying on your back makes it worse, because gravity pulls the tongue and soft palate backwards into the airway. That is why snoring often quietens when the snorer rolls over, and why so many fixes are really about stopping you lying flat on your back.
When it is more than noise
Most snoring is just noise. Some of it is a warning.
In sleep apnoea, the airway does not just narrow. It closes, and breathing stops for a few seconds at a time, over and over through the night. Each stop ends with a small wake-up the sleeper rarely remembers. 5 Ways to Harness Your Energy and Beat the Afternoon Slump has the clue to watch for: loud snoring and waking tired after a full night. It also has the scale of it: an estimated 936 million adults aged 30 to 69 have sleep apnoea.
The signs that should send you to get checked are loud snoring with gasping or choking, pauses in breathing that someone else has noticed, and heavy sleepiness in the day. Why You're Still Exhausted Despite Doing Everything Right, linked below, has sleep apnoea among the plain physical causes of tiredness. What Your Eyes, Tongue, Nails, Skin, and Breath Are Telling You, linked below, has the scalloped tongue, a weak hint that points the same way.
Heavy snoring may matter even without apnoea. In 110 volunteers with at most mild sleep apnoea, fatty plaque in the arteries of the neck was found in 20% of light snorers, 32% of moderate snorers and 64% of those who snored for more than half the night. After allowing for age, sex, smoking and blood pressure, heavy snoring went with 10.5 times the odds of plaque in the neck arteries, though not in the arteries of the legs. The neck arteries run right beside the vibrating throat.
There is a simple check you can run on yourself first. Four yes-or-no questions were built to pick out sleep apnoea: do you Snore loudly, are you often Tired in the day, has anyone Observed you stop breathing, and do you have high blood Pressure? Tested against overnight recordings, these questions picked out about three in four people with moderate sleep apnoea, and adding body weight, age, neck size and sex raised that to more than nine in ten. If you answer yes to several, get checked.
It also helps to record yourself. When snoring is assessed, how often it happens, how loud it is, whether it is regular, and whether it depends on how you lie all matter, and a recording made by the snorer or a partner is sometimes useful. A phone left recording by the bed shows which nights, which positions, and what the room actually sounds like at night.
Children snore too, and in children the usual cause is different: enlarged tonsils and adenoids, the lumps of tissue at the back of the nose and throat. It is worth watching. Of children with plain snoring, 37% had developed sleep apnoea four years later. And a snoring child costs the parents sleep as well. It can show up in the day, too. Of 866 children seen at two clinics, 16% snored most nights, and high hyperactivity scores turned up in 22% of the snorers against 12% of the children who did not snore. Inattention and hyperactivity often improve once the breathing problem is treated.
The partner's night
The person beside you pays a price, and it has been measured. Snoring itself is graded by loudness: mild snoring runs at about 40 to 50 decibels, like quiet conversation; moderate at 50 to 60, like a car passing slowly; severe above 60, like busy traffic or a vacuum cleaner. Now imagine the vacuum cleaner is on the next pillow.
Ten married couples slept in a sleep lab together, each with one partner suspected of sleep apnoea. Halfway through the night, the snorer was given a machine that kept the airway open and stopped the snoring. Before it, the spouses were woken, briefly, 21 times an hour. After it, 12. The share of the night they spent actually asleep rose from 74% to 87%.
That is the difference between a night and a broken night, for someone who did nothing but lie next to you. Love is patient. It is not deaf.
Your back
If snoring is worse on your back, the simplest fix is not to sleep on it. The back can be most of the problem: of 574 people with sleep apnoea, 55.9% had at least twice as many breathing problems lying on their backs as on their sides.
The old trick is a tennis ball sewn into a pocket on the back of a pyjama top. Roll onto your back, and the ball rolls you off again. It works. The trouble is that almost nobody keeps doing it. When 67 people who had been told to use the tennis ball were asked about two and a half years later, only 6% were still using it. Another 13% had learned to stay off their backs without it. The other 81% had given up and gone back to sleeping on their backs, mostly because the ball was too uncomfortable. A cure you will not use is not a cure.
So make side sleeping easy rather than painful. A long body pillow to hug gives you something to stay against, and a pillow of the right height, such as this , keeps your head level when you lie on your side. A small backpack with a towel inside works like a gentler tennis ball. And raising the head of the bed, with a wedge or by lifting the legs at the top of the bed frame, takes some of gravity's pull off the throat when you do end up on your back.
Weight
Fat does not only gather at the waist. It gathers around the neck too, where it presses on the airway from outside.
When 690 working adults in Wisconsin were checked four years apart, weight changes moved their night-time breathing with them. Gaining a tenth of their body weight went with about 32% more breathing pauses an hour. Losing a tenth went with about 26% fewer. And gaining a tenth came with six times the odds of developing moderate to severe sleep apnoea.
So if the snoring started when the weight came on, the weight is a good place to start. Your collar size is a breathing measurement.
Alcohol and sedatives
A drink before bed relaxes you. It relaxes your throat too.
In one test, people with sleep apnoea slept in a lab after drinking alcohol. Their airway closed more often and for longer, and their oxygen dropped further in the first hour of sleep. Two of the people in the test were ordinary snorers without apnoea. After alcohol, both developed full sleep apnoea in the first hour.
Sleeping pills and other sedatives can relax the same muscles. If you snore, the nightcap is one of the cheapest things to cut. It also saves you the price of the drink.
Smoking
Smoking shows up at night too. Among 811 adults in Wisconsin whose sleep was recorded in a lab, current smokers had about 2.3 times the odds of snoring and 4.4 times the odds of moderate or worse sleep apnoea, compared with people who had never smoked. Former smokers were no different from people who had never smoked at all. Stopping seems to take the extra risk away. It is one of the few habits that gives its money back.
The nose
When the nose is blocked, you end up breathing through your mouth all night.
A cold, an allergy or a dusty bedroom can all block the nose. Dust mites, pet hair and pollen are the usual culprits, so wash bedding hot, keep pets out of the bedroom, and keep the room clean and aired. A saline rinse or spray clears the nose without drugs: a squeeze bottle such as the NeilMed washes it through with salt water.
Nasal strips, which pull the nostrils open, are sold as a snoring cure. In the throat-exercise test below, the comparison group used nasal strips every night for three months. Their snoring did not change. A strip can help if the nose itself is the bottleneck. For most snoring, the noise comes from further back. You cannot stick a plaster on a floppy throat.
Train the throat
If loose muscle is the problem, training the muscle should help. It does.
In a test of 39 people who snored, some with mild to moderate sleep apnoea, half did a set of daily mouth and throat exercises for three months, and half used nasal strips with simple breathing exercises. The exercise group's loud snores fell by about half, and their total snoring by about half too. The nasal-strip group did not change. The exercises are simple, repeated movements of the tongue, soft palate and jaw, the kind you can do at the kitchen table.
Singing has been tested as well. Of 93 adults with snoring or sleep apnoea who finished a test, those who followed a singing programme at home became less sleepy during the day and snored less often than the comparison group. How loudly they snored only trended down. So the old advice to sing turns out to have something behind it. The shower solo was medicine all along.
The didgeridoo, as the opening test showed, works on the same muscles. It makes you control a steady stream of air through a working throat.
Devices
For snoring that does not respond, the most common device is a mouthpiece worn at night that holds the lower jaw slightly forward. Moving the jaw pulls the tongue forward with it and tightens the soft palate and the walls of the throat, which leaves more room for air and less loose tissue to vibrate. They are best fitted properly, and if there is any sign of sleep apnoea, get checked before relying on one.
Play on
The didgeridoo players in that 2006 test did not cure their sleep apnoea. But they were less tired in the day, their breathing paused less often, and the person beside them slept better. That is what fixing snoring is really for.
Start with the cheapest changes: your back, the nightcap, the nose. Give each one time before you judge it, and ask the person beside you, because they will know before you do. They have been listening for years.
Tonight, before bed, put a body pillow behind you so you stay on your side, and ask your partner in the morning whether it was quieter.
Sleeping enough and still exhausted? Why You're Still Exhausted Despite Doing Everything Right — how a body can be exhausted and wide awake at once, the recovery that turns into a second job, and the plain physical causes worth a check.
Curious what else your body shows? What Your Eyes, Tongue, Nails, Skin, and Breath Are Telling You About Your Health — which signs hold up, which are folklore, and what a scalloped tongue does and does not tell you.
Know someone who snores and swears they do not? Send them this, and maybe a pillow.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health, talk to a qualified health professional. Loud snoring with gasping, choking or pauses in breathing, or heavy sleepiness in the day, is worth getting checked for sleep apnoea, especially if you drive.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
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