Think of a guitar string. It makes noise as it vibrates. As you age, your airway/soft pallet/esophagus loses tone and breathing in and out causes vibrations which you hear as a snore.
What To Do About It?
Health:
Snoring is not a medical issue but is an indicator of a future issue - sleep apnea. This is when your airway closes all the way. It is silent because no air is moving through your airway. This continues until your blood oxygen levels drop to a degree that your body wakes itself up to restore airway rigidity and oxygen flow. This is sleep apnea and can happen 10s to 100s of times an hour. This is like overclocking the computer of you and creates organ strain which most often will first manifest as unhealthy blood pressure issues or blood sugar issues.
If you are snoring, get a home sleep test and determine if you've progressed to apnea. Its cheap, fast and its medical efficacy is equivalent for testing Obstructive Sleep Apnea.
There are other kinds of rare apnea conditions but Obstructive Sleep Apnea is the vast majority of cases.
If you have sleep apnea, the leading treatment is a CPAP machine. Dental devices ( thedaybreak.com) and weight loss pills (GLP-1s) are rising in popularity. Apnimed.com is in third stage clinicals for sleep apnea pill.
While there's a low chance, visit your ENT and make sure you don't have anything swollen our outside of normal in your airway. If you are allergic to something in your home this can also cause the swelling and snoring and reducing the triggers can reduce or eliminate the snoring. Unlikely but it happens.
Reduce/Eliminate The Sound:
1. If snoring is soft pallet related, pull your jaw forward with a dental device.
3. EPAP devices. They create back pressure when breathing, largely uncomfortable but will open the airway if you can tolerate them.
4. Positional devices or adjustable bed bases. Anything from tennis balls stitched into your shirt to Rx devices that sense your position and alert/encourage you to move positions. Largely a delaying action. If you are sleeping upright in a lazyboy or similar to sleep, it is a bigger deal than changing positions and you need to get checked out for apnea.
5. Mouth tape. This is largely a bad idea and I caution you against it. If you must, monitor your O2 levels when using it with a finger pulse ox.
I believe that this comment is unintentionally the reason healthcare is broken in America.
America is capitalist and federalist. That means either hospitals are for profit entities, non-profit entities or government owned entities.
Ducks quack, for profit entities attempt to grow profits, non-profit entities attempt to grow donors and government entities attempt to keep the things way they were yesterday.
As a society, we can pick which models we allow and in which allocation, but we can't ask a duck to be a swan - each option has positives and negatives.
When we ask for the positives without the negatives, then complain when the inevitable negatives come, is the fault with the model or with our expectations?
The better way is to iterate and grapple with the rewards in the system and where transparency should be forced or legislated. Change the incentives and you'll change the behavior. Unfortunately, you will also encounter new and unexpected negative effects...see: ducks quack.
Think of a guitar string. It makes noise as it vibrates. As you age, your airway/soft pallet/esophagus loses tone and breathing in and out causes vibrations which you hear as a snore.
What To Do About It?
Health:
Snoring is not a medical issue but is an indicator of a future issue - sleep apnea. This is when your airway closes all the way. It is silent because no air is moving through your airway. This continues until your blood oxygen levels drop to a degree that your body wakes itself up to restore airway rigidity and oxygen flow. This is sleep apnea and can happen 10s to 100s of times an hour. This is like overclocking the computer of you and creates organ strain which most often will first manifest as unhealthy blood pressure issues or blood sugar issues.
If you are snoring, get a home sleep test and determine if you've progressed to apnea. Its cheap, fast and its medical efficacy is equivalent for testing Obstructive Sleep Apnea.
https://www.cpap.com/pages/home-sleep-test https://www.sleeping.com/ https://lofta.com/ https://sleepdoctor.com/
There are other kinds of rare apnea conditions but Obstructive Sleep Apnea is the vast majority of cases.
If you have sleep apnea, the leading treatment is a CPAP machine. Dental devices ( thedaybreak.com) and weight loss pills (GLP-1s) are rising in popularity. Apnimed.com is in third stage clinicals for sleep apnea pill.
While there's a low chance, visit your ENT and make sure you don't have anything swollen our outside of normal in your airway. If you are allergic to something in your home this can also cause the swelling and snoring and reducing the triggers can reduce or eliminate the snoring. Unlikely but it happens.
Reduce/Eliminate The Sound:
1. If snoring is soft pallet related, pull your jaw forward with a dental device.
https://www.cpap.com/products/somnofit-s-anti-snore-mouth-gu...
https://tinyurl.com/mytapdentaldevice
2. Strengthen the soft pallet by playing a didgeridoo or buying and using daily an exciteOSA device https://www.cpap.com/products/exciteosa-starter-pack-cpap-co...
3. EPAP devices. They create back pressure when breathing, largely uncomfortable but will open the airway if you can tolerate them.
4. Positional devices or adjustable bed bases. Anything from tennis balls stitched into your shirt to Rx devices that sense your position and alert/encourage you to move positions. Largely a delaying action. If you are sleeping upright in a lazyboy or similar to sleep, it is a bigger deal than changing positions and you need to get checked out for apnea.
5. Mouth tape. This is largely a bad idea and I caution you against it. If you must, monitor your O2 levels when using it with a finger pulse ox.
https://www.cpap.com/products/digital-finger-pulse-oximeter?...