While sleep apnea and severe snoring issues often require some type of medical device or even more invasive measures, sometimes lighter snoring problems just require a slight change in your lifestyle. Below we explore some tips you can use to try and curb your snoring issues. None of them is guaranteed to actually prevent snoring but may contribute to making the problem less pronounced.
Establish proper sleeping patterns
There have been links made between how soundly a person sleeps and their level of snoring. People who are very tired or often disturbed during their sleep are far more likely to experience snoring problems during the night.
Establishing consistent sleeping patterns and getting a sufficient number of sleeping hours each night, can go a long way to prevent snoring and increasing your general vitality. This isn’t a surefire method but will definitely curb the problem.
Avoid alcohol and other depressants too close to bedtime
Alcohol, sedatives and sleeping pills tend to relax the muscles in your body. This includes the muscles in your throat and mouth. This can make your breathing passages narrower causing not only more respiratory resistance but the actual tissue in the throat to become more relaxed, resulting in a far more intense snoring problem.
For people with sleep apnea, this can even be life-threatening. Try to avoid consuming any alcohol or medication with sedating qualities, at least three hours before sleep. In fact, even simple dairy products can cause increased mucus production and, by extension, your chance of snoring.
Exercise more
Your snoring problems can often be attributed to a general lack of muscle tone. If you don’t exercise often the muscles in your throat can make the breathing passages more prone to collapsing.
Being fitter will also help with your level of fatigue during the waking hours, making you more restful and allow you to sleep better. Which, as mentioned above, is a very helpful step in the prevention of snoring.
Quit smoking
Smoking tends to irritate the mucus membranes in your throat and nose causing them to overproduce and restrict your breathing. Furthermore, the broad health implications of a regular smoking habit produce a variety of symptoms that will contribute to your snoring problem. If you eliminate smoking completely, your body will begin to recover some of its former respiratory capacity. There may not be rule of thumb on how to prevent snoring but being able to breathe better in general will making your snoring less noticeable and have less of a health impact.
Humidifiers
A humidifier is a product that turns water into vapour and distributes it in a room. It can help clear congestion and other breathing problems by encouraging the throat to drain its mucus. As with most of the solutions mentioned above, it won’t necessarily prevent snoring (although it just as easily could) but using this in conjunction with the other methods will make the conditions less severe and may even temper the problem more over time.
