I don’t snore, at least I don’t think I do. Having said that, 60 per cent of people who do snore, refuse to accept they have a problem, so maybe I’m one of those. I have received an occasional poke in the ribs from my wife after a night in my local tavern, but those visits are rare now.
So, I will rephrase that and say I don’t snore much. I have woken myself from a light doze a few times with a snort and maybe that counts. If I was a regular snorer though, I imagine my wife would be complaining more about it, but she isn’t. She is a deep sleeper herself however so maybe she just isn’t aware of it.
There are different levels of snoring. There is a gentle whimper you’d hardly even recognise as a snore and a noisier version that is fairly harmless but could disturb you if you were in close proximity. Then there is the executive model. A noise of such magnitude it could be used to warn ships of impending danger and I experienced one of those.
Many years ago, I was part of a humanitarian aid convoy delivering medical supplies to orphanages, hospitals, day care centres etc in Belarus in the aftermath of the nuclear accident at the power plant in Chernobyl. The days were long and tiring and there was lots of driving involved. Unloading the trucks by hand was hard going too so by nightfall, we were ready for sleep.
We usually spent the night in our vehicles, but we were sometimes offered a bit of floor space indoors when it was available and occasionally, we got the comfort of a bed. It was on one of these occasions that I encountered the king of all snorers.
There were about twenty of us sleeping in small single beds in a large dormitory-type room. At some point, I woke up to a terrible racket. To say this guy was snoring doesn’t do justice to the sound coming out of his body. It was hard to believe a human could even produce such a din and live through it.
The room was dimly lit but there was some light filtering through the windows, and I could see others in the room also sitting up trying to identify the source of the noise. It wasn’t hard to find him. Various missiles were sent flying in his direction, but it didn’t quieten him. Eventually it became too much for a group of truck drivers who surrounded his bed, grabbed hold of his mattress and carried him outside. They placed him on the grass under one of the trucks and left him there.
Peace was restored once more but this guy was so loud, we could still hear him snoring in the distance. It was funny at the time, and it took us a while to get back to sleep we were laughing so much but there is a serious side to snoring. It can cause problems in relationships and can also be a threat to health of the snorer. So, what causes it.
It happens when the walls of the throat relax and narrow as we sleep, partially blocking the upper airway. The snoring sound is caused by vibrations of the tongue, nose and throat. This helps to explain why men snore more often and more loudly than women: men tend to have larger airways, into which their tongues fall back when they sleep, plus a higher proportion of fat in the upper part of the tongue.
According to the Times UK, new research has found that those who snore may be at risk of harming their bodies and brains. The good news is that lifestyle changes and medical advances can help to alleviate the problem. Light snoring or occasional nocturnal snorts are harmless, but at the other end of the spectrum, when snoring is sufficiently ground shaking to be called obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), it could be a threat to your physical and cognitive health.
If that’s not bad enough, The Irish Examiner had more worrying news and reported that people who experience sleep problems are more likely to have a stroke. Getting too much or too little sleep, taking long naps, snoring, snorting, and sleep apnoea are associated with an increased risk of stroke, a global study co-led by the University of Galway has found.
People who sleep for too many or too few hours are more likely to have a stroke than people who sleep an average number of hours. They also found snorers are almost twice as likely as non-snorers to have a stroke and that’s not all.
Many couples sleep in separate rooms because of snoring and in some cases, head for the divorce court. Understandable I suppose. We all get cranky when we don’t get enough sleep and when that’s happening on a regular basis it wouldn’t be long wearing you down. It’s easy to see how tensions might rise and create difficulties in the best of relationships. It’s not all bad news though.
A Cardiff woman woke in the early hours from her husband’s ‘snoring’. Her annoyance turned to panic when she could not rouse 39-year-old who was a fit and active cycling enthusiast. It turned out he was in cardiac arrest, and she thought her husband had died.
She called the Welsh Ambulance Service who instructed her how to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), which she did for eight minutes until the ambulance arrived. The ambulance crew shocked the patient with a defibrillator fifteen times to restart his heart. He survived but spent a month in hospital before being discharged.
So, the next time to get the urge to knee your snoring partner in the back, check his pulse first.