Tips To Help Control Snoring

Snoring is not in itself harmful and nearly all of us snore at some point or another in our lives. When you share a bed with a partner who snores regularly, however, it can affect your quality of sleep or even keep you awake through the night. This can lead to tiredness, irritability and even depression if not remedied. Unless your partner suffers from sleep apnoea there is usually a simple trick to either prevent them from snoring at all or to stop them once they start. As snoring is not an illness there is no cure, but it can be controlled.

Sleep position

The majority of snoring occurs when someone is sleeping on their back. This is because the throat muscles and tongue relax in such a way as to restrict the breathing somewhat. Placing a pillow in the middle of the bed can be enough to prevent a snorer from rolling onto their back. For more severe cases, try sewing half a tennis ball into the back of the snorer’s pyjamas. Every time they try to roll onto their back the lump will wake them slightly and they will roll back.

Decongestants

If the snoring is something which occurs in the aftermath of a cold or allergy outbreak it could be due to congestion. Simply popping a decongestant tablet before bed may well do the trick. Alternatively you could try inhaling mentholated steam for ten minutes or so about half an hour before you go to bed to clear nasal passages.

No alcohol

A lot of people snore after they have been drinking alcohol. Although there is no scientific explanation for why this is true, the fact remains that it is true. Abstaining from alcohol for at least four hours before bed has been shown to have a positive effect in terms of not snoring.

Lose weight

Heavier people are more likely to snore than their lighter counterparts. If you are overweight then losing a few pounds will not only make you snore less but will have a positive effect on your general health as well. On top of this, getting exercise during the day makes for a better night’s sleep.

Buy a new mattress

It could be that the very bed you sleep in is the cause of your snoring. Dust mites may be causing allergies to flare up or you could be sleeping in a strange position because your mattress has collapsed in the middle. Something of the same quality as a hotel mattress could be what is needed to aid you and your long suffering partner in getting a restful, snore-free night.

Take A Nap And Lose Weight

You hit the gym about four times a week. You sincerely watch what you eat. But you don't seem to be losing weight!!!!

The reason could be all those late nights that you are awake. If you want to lose weight, experts say you need to get enough sleep. Specifically, researchers have reported that women who sleep 5 hours or less per night generally weigh more than women who sleep 7 hours per night.

Sleep deprivation plays havoc on hormones. Leptin and ghrelin work in a kind of "checks and balances" system to control feelings of hunger and fullness. The hormone 'Ghrelin' is responsible for creating the hunger pangs and the hormone 'Leptin' tells the brain when to stop. When you don't sleep the Ghrelin levels increase and the Leptin levels decrease. The result is increased craving for food and not being satisfied inspite of eating more than you normally do.

So what's the connection to sleep? "When you don't get enough sleep, it drives leptin levels down, which means you don't feel as satisfied after you eat. Lack of sleep also causes ghrelin levels to rise, which means your appetite is stimulated, so you want more food,"

Secondly, the growth hormone is secreted, for the most part, during first round of sleep. This hormone plays a very vital role in managing the body weight as it controls the body's proportion of muscle and fat. When you don't get enough sleep the body tends to secrete less of this hormone resulting in increased body fat. Aging is another factor which reduces the time we spend in deep sleep which in turn reduces the secretion of growth hormones. This significantly increases the chances of weight gain.

A session of peaceful sleep helps reduce stress. Lack of sleep increases the stress and increased glucose levels. Sleep deprivation puts your body into a starvation mode. Sleep deprived people tend to eat high calorie sweets, salty snacks. This is because of the increased craving for food. Sleep deprivation and sluggishness go hand in hand. Lack of sleep reduces the physical activity levels. Even small activities like siting, standing, fidgeting are significantly reduced and hence you burn fewer calories there by making weightless difficult.

How many hours of sleep does one need?

If you are unsure of how many hours of sleep you need, then experiment. Sleep as much as you can for four nights in a row. The amount of time that you sleep the last night is the approximate hours of sleep that you need every night. That's because by the fourth night your body is refreshed completely and the body clock will reach the natural rhythm. Make sure you are on a balanced diet and also exercise 4-5 times a week. The health tip for a healthy body is a good night's sleep.

Tips for Good night's sleep

1. Don't go to bed hungry. This does not mean that we should have a heavy dinner, A light dinner diet rich in sleep inducing amino acid tryptophan can help.
2. Exercise at least three hours before bed time. Physical activity contributes to sleep. But exercising too close to bedtime increases the metabolism rate and alertness thus preventing sleep.
3. Take a warm water bath before bedtime. The body temperature will drop once you finish your bath thus inducing sleep.
4. keep your days active. Resist the temptation to nap during the day, so that your body is ready to sleep during the night.

The Big Sleep

This blog usually focuses on diet, because that's my specialty. But if you want Whole Health, you need the whole package: a diet and lifestyle that is broadly consistent with our evolutionary heritage. I think we all know that on some level, but a recent paper has reminded me of it.

I somehow managed to get on the press list of the Annals of Internal Medicine. That means they send me embargoed papers before they're released to the general public. That journal publishes a lot of high-impact diet studies, so it's a great privilege for me. I get to write about the studies, and publish my analysis at the time of general release, which is the same time the news outlets publish their stories.

One of the papers they sent me recently is a fat loss trial with an interesting twist (1; see below). All participants were told to eat 10% fewer calories that usual for two weeks, however half of them were instructed to sleep for 8 and a half hours per night, and the other half were instructed to sleep for 5 and a half hours*. The actual recorded sleep times were 7:25 and 5:14, respectively.

Weight loss by calorie restriction causes a reduction of both fat and lean mass, which is what the investigators observed. Both groups lost the same amount of weight. However, 80% of the weight was lost as fat in the high-sleep group (2.4/3.0 kg lost as fat), while only 48% of it was lost as fat in the low-sleep group (1.4/2.9 kg lost as fat). Basically, the sleep-deprived group lost as much lean mass as they did fat mass, which is not good!

There are many observational studies showing associations between insufficient sleep, obesity and diabetes. However, I think studies like that are particularly vulnerable to confounding variables, so I've never known quite what to make of them. Furthermore, they often show that long sleep duration associates with poor health as well, which I find highly unlikely to reflect cause and effect. I discussed one of those studies in a post a couple of years ago (2). That's why I appreciate this controlled trial so much.

Another sleep restriction trial published in the Lancet in 1999 showed that restricting healthy young men to four hours of sleep per night caused them to temporarily develop glucose intolerance, or pre-diabetes (3).

Furthermore, their daily rhythm of the hormone cortisol became abnormal. Rather than the normal pattern of a peak in the morning and a dip in the evening, sleep deprivation blunted their morning cortisol level and enhanced it in the evening. Cortisol is a stress hormone, among other things, and its fluctuations may contribute to our ability to feel awake in the morning and ready for bed at night.

The term "adrenal fatigue", which refers to the aforementioned disturbance in cortisol rhythm, is characterized by general fatigue, difficulty waking up in the morning, and difficulty going to sleep at night. It's a term that's commonly used by alternative medical practitioners but not generally accepted by mainstream medicine, possibly because it's difficult to demonstrate and the symptoms are fairly general. Robb Wolf talks about it in his book The Paleo Solution.

The investigators concluded:

Sleep debt has a harmful impact on carbohydrate metabolism and endocrine function. The effects are similar to those seen in normal ageing and, therefore, sleep debt may increase the severity of age-related chronic disorders.

So there you have it. Besides making us miserable, lack of sleep appears to predispose to obesity and diabetes, and probably sets us up for the Big Sleep down the line. I can't say I'm surprised, given how awful I feel after even one night of six hour sleep. I feel best after 9 hours, and I probably average about 8.5. Does it cut into my free time? Sure. But it's worth it to me, because it allows me to enjoy my day much more.

Keep your room as dark as possible during sleep. It also helps to avoid bright light, particularly in the blue spectrum, before bed (4). "Soft white" bulbs are preferable to full spectrum in the evening. If you need to use your computer, dim the monitor and adjust it to favor warm over cool colors. For people who sleep poorly due to anxiety, meditation before bed can be highly effective. I posted a tutorial here.

1. Nedeltcheva, AV et al. "Insufficient Sleep Undermines Dietary Efforts to Reduce Adiposity." Annals of Internal Medicine. 2010. Advanced publication.


* The study was a randomized crossover design with a 3 month washout period, which I consider a rigorous design. I think the study overall was very clever. The investigators used calorie restriction to cause rapid changes in body composition so that they could see differences on a reasonable timescale, rather than trying to deprive people of sleep for months and look for more gradual body fat changes without dietary changes. The latter experiment would have been more interesting, but potentially impractical and unethical.