Sleep apnea is a condition that causes your breathing to stop while you’re asleep.
Don’t worry! This isn’t the same thing as instant suffocation. In fact, our bodies are pretty amazing. We have incredible back-up systems for quite a number of potential complications.
Let’s walk you through exactly how this works.
Obstructive Sleep Apnea
Most cases of apnea are obstructive, which means that your airway is physically blocked.
During the day, we carry a certain amount of tension in all of our muscles, simply due to consciousness. This tension, combined with sitting or standing upright, easily keeps our airways open and our breathing consistent.
When we fall asleep, however, everything relaxes. That includes our air passages, our jaws, and our tongues. Gravity plus relaxed airway tissues means that those passages close in on themselves.
The Body’s Back-Up Reaction
As mentioned above, the body doesn’t just give up and suffocate when the airways close. It knows that it could breathe perfectly fine while conscious. So, when it has run out of other ideas, it simply wakes us up until it can take a deep breath.
These moments are usually a microsecond or less. Sufferers often don’t even wake up long enough to remember it happened. That’s part of the reason that so many people don’t realize they have apnea. These sleep interruptions are almost completely unnoticeable.
They do, however, break up sleep cycles, sometimes completely preventing sleepers from entering REM sleep at all. The sufferer will wake up the next day thinking they had a complete and full night’s sleep and yet feel totally exhausted.
What Causes Chronic Snoring?
Chronic snoring often accompanies symptoms of sleep apnea. There is often a connection between snoring and sleep apnea.
If you have ever stretched the mouth of a balloon to make it squeal as the air escapes, then you already know exactly how snoring happens during obstructive sleep apnea.
As discussed above, the airways in the back of the throat are either all the way blocked or nearly closed, yet the body will not just stop trying to breathe. It simply increases the force of the indrawn breath and tries again.
Every breath of pressurized air forces oxygen through this small space. The pressure, combined with the relaxed state of the throat tissue, makes your throat act just like that balloon.
The severity of the snoring will, of course, depend on the particular state of your throat, which means every case will be unique. So, too, will be any treatments.
Talk to Us About Sleep Apnea
If any of this process seems familiar to you or if you suffer from several of the symptoms on the next page, then you might have obstructive sleep apnea.
Talk to us sooner rather than later so that we can get you a proper diagnosis and begin to build a treatment plan that is right for you.