Watch Out for the Season When Your Snoring Worsens

In 2015, a University of Wisconsin researcher published a fascinating study in the journal Sleep and Breathing on the relationship between snoring and asleep apnea and the year’s seasons.

They discovered that for a specific time of the year, both snoring and sleep apnea peaks.

Unlike the usual academic approach, the researchers behind this study consulted Google to obtain the frequency of search terms for snoring and sleep apnea throughout the year.

Both search terms “snoring” and “sleep apnea” peaked in winter and early spring. This indicate these are the times when most people experiences these conditions.

This supports Brazilian research published in the December 2012 edition of the journal Chest. Unfortunately.

This team did not test for snoring specifically, but mostly for sleep apnea and hypopnea, which refers to abnormally shallow and slow breathing, usually due to partial obstruction of the airway.

They used an already existing database of 7,523 people who had undergone in-laboratory tracking of physiological changes while they were sleeping. They then combined this data with seasonal information.

They discovered that breathing was indeed worse during the six colder months of the year, peaking during the coldest part of winter.

At this stage, the reasons for the seasonality are unknown, but some speculation is in order.

Since allergies often coincide with swelling in your nasal passages and throat, they might be responsible for some of your breathing difficulties while asleep during the pollen-rich spring and during the winter when you either sleep in a closed room with dust and pet hair, or circulate dust around your room through central heating.

If it has something to do with atmospheric pressure or other environmental effects, it is obviously beyond your control.

The good news is that no matter what the weather is, you can use simple exercises to open up your breathing passages so you sleep quietly throughout the night. The stop snoring exercises, found here, work both for snoring and sleep apnea…