Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a severe sleep problem. Those with sleep apnea cease breathing momentarily during sleep. Hundreds of times a night, these pauses disrupt sleep and cause health problems. Should you have sleep apnea, there are steps you can take to enhance your well-being and quality of sleep.
Changing Lifestyle to Prevent Sleep Apnea
These good lifestyle choices can aid with milder forms of sleep apnea:
- Not gaining weight: Most often occurring in those who are obese or overweight is sleep apnea. Obesity can aggravate neck fat deposits, which raises your risk of airway collapse. Keeping a good weight by eating a good diet and consistent exercise will help you lower your risk of sleep apnea.
- Frequent Movement: Three to five times weekly at least thirty-minute exercise helps lower your risk of sleep apnea. Moreover, exercise helps to regulate your sleep pattern and quality.
- Keep away from alcohol: Reducing your alcohol intake will help lower your chances of sleep apnea, especially near bedtime. If you do not wake up should your oxygen level drop, alcohol might cause more heavy sleep and aggravate snoring. Moreover, drinking can cause your tongue to relax more, which would lead to snoring.
- Cut back on smoking: By aggravating upper airway inflammation and affecting upper airway muscle actions and arousal mechanisms, smoking can worsen sleep apnea. Untreated sleep apnea has a correlation with smoking addiction.
- Mouth workouts: Mouth exercises to strengthen your tongue and throat muscles—oropharyngeal muscular exercises—may help ease symptoms of sleep apnea.
Practice of Sleep Hygiene
Apart from implementing good lifestyle choices, keeping consistent and good sleeping habits helps to reduce symptoms:
Change your posture for sleeping. Sleeping on your back raises your chance of constriction of the airways. Sleeping on your side, though, can help the airways remain open.
Sit in a sleep posture. Try putting a sleep positioner—wedge-type pillow—behind you to stop you from turning onto your back should you wake up on your back in the middle of the night.
Keep to a sleeping regimen. Although this won’t cure sleep apnea, regular sleep hygiene helps to create a normal sleep pattern.
Moist your bedroom. A humidifier can help ease sleep apnea’s dry mouth effects.
Attach a nasal strip. Nighttime nasal strips or dilators help to increase airflow and lessen snoring. Usually found over-counter in any drugstore, nasal strips and dilators are not expensive.
Medical Actions Against Sleep Apnea
If your sleep apnea is mild to severe and lifestyle adjustments have little effect on symptoms. Devices exist to help open airways. Possibly required is surgery as well. Medical therapies used to stop sleep apnea consist of:
Constant positive air pressure (CPAP). Many times used to treat sleep apnea, the CPAP machine is a breathing aid. Wearing a mask over your nose or mouth, a CPAP lets you sleep by continuously pressing your upper airways. While sleeping, the air pressure facilitates breathing and helps to keep your airways open.
Oral devices. Form-fitting dental appliances, sleep apnea mouth guards move your tongue, jaw, or soft palate to widen the airways as you sleep.
For those suffering with sleep apnea, there are several surgical choices available:
- Implants: A palatal implant is a minimally invasive procedure used to strengthen the soft palate therefore lessening snoring.
- Uvulopalatomy with laser assistance: A surgeon removes tissues from your mouth and throat in laser-assisted uvulopalatoplasty to widen your upper airways and boost airflow.
Call us right now for an evaluation if you have sleep apnea.