The War On Sleep: How it started. How we lost. How you can recover. by Voss Michael

Author:Voss, Michael [Voss, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Snoring: The Sound of Gradual Death

Of all the things I can think of in our lives today that are major health risks that we ignore or take too lightly, snoring is number one.

Wherever we might see snoring depicted in popular culture, it is shown as something quite different than what it really is. I think my first awareness of snoring was in cartoons when I was a kid of maybe age 3 or 4. Whenever someone was asleep, this would be indicated by loud, whimsical snoring. Sometimes the sound would be imaged as sawing wood and I recall that being an old colloquialism for sleep – referring to a time during which I’d been asleep, my dad would laughingly say, “You were sawing wood”. (Though at that age I doubt I snored, but that was just a common way of describing sleep which speaks to how common snoring must have been.)

Wherever snoring appears in popular culture, it is depicted as something common, normal, whimsical, indicative of someone sleeping soundly. None of these things could be further from the truth. Snoring is the sound of an obstructed airway partially (and sometimes totally) choking off the air supply of someone trying to sleep. There is nothing lighthearted nor anything whimsical about it; it is the sound of medical distress and, ultimately, a long, slow death. We need to change how we view this phenomenon.

I have had to deal with chronic snoring twice now in my 15-year journey to better sleep. In the early days, I suffered from a combination of throat and nasal issues all of which required surgical correction: A deviated septum, enlarged nasal turbinates, vibrating soft palate tissues, and diminished nasal passage capacity. These things have an interactive synergy that combine to make breathing far worse than any one alone. After my surgery, I no longer snored and could sleep through the night breathing through my nose after using the taping method to train myself not to breathe through my mouth, over the course of about a year. Things were looking up.

Then, a few years later in mid-2017, I got a shock. I had an increasing number of nights where my sleep quality seemed to go bad during the night. I was not sure what changed, but the data was shifting rapidly enough to raise alarm bells. You may recall the dip mentioned earlier in my 6-year graph in mid-2017 - this was that time. I rapidly plunged from 90% sleep quality to almost 70%:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.