How to Stop Snoring: Initial Experiments

I’ve been conducting some tests on myself over the past couple weeks to see what minimizes my snoring, and I figured now would be a great time to start logging my findings.

The Essentials: Stuff You Need

There are really only 3 things you need to conduct these tests:

1. A body
2. A bed
3. This app. It records you while you sleep, and it’s how you can measure the success of your efforts.

Things I’ve Tried So Far + The Results

Notes before I start…..

I’ve learned that snoring can be caused by a few different things, and that there are multiple types of snoring. This article was probably the most helpful of all that I read. So when you’re reading through my results, don’t necessarily write off something just because it didn’t work for me. We’re different people, bro. It might work for you.

The control

My average amount of snoring for the few nights I recorded was typically between 1-2 hrs of total snore time. So let’s call it an hour and a half as the control.

Exercise – Success!

I’ve learned that exercise is insofar the most reliable way to mitigate my snoring. For some tests I am conducting with regards to timing and frequency of exercise, see the bottom of this page. Exercise that works for me:

• Cycling
• Hot yoga
• Yin yoga – more on this in a sec
• Crossfit
• Climbing

…there’s no form of exercise I’ve tried that hasn’t worked, let’s put it that way.

Another note here is that skipping a day of exercise did not have a noticeable result when I tried it. In other words, the benefits of the exercise the day before carried over through that night. I will need to test this more though.

Yin Yoga – MASSIVE Success

Last night I did Yin yoga for the first time. And holy fuck, I didn’t snore AT ALL. Isn’t that cray-cray? I know the practice is supposed to help you sleep better, so I am not especially surprised. There are factors to it that I want to test though. Because I’ve been wondering for a little while if proximity to bedtime — or maybe even the relationship between when I eat vs. exercise — affects things. Here are ways in which my Yin experiment was different than the normal stuff I’ve been doing.

1. Yin was later at night. My class was from 7:30-8:30 and I went to bed around 11.
   1. Usually when I ride my bike, it’s around 5 or 6
   2. Hot yoga is usually around 5 or 6, or at mid-day
   3. Crossfit is usually in the mornings
   4. Climbing is usually at 7 — so, similar time here. But this is mostly upper-body vs full-body workout.
2. I ate dinner before yoga. So like around 6. And all I had to eat after was half of a Safeway lava cake. (not as good as Domino’s) And I usually eat dinner around 9. I also ate at Rice vs. my usual Ted’s.
3. It was not super aerobic. Usually when I do hot yoga, I’m dying by the end. And burn like 50,000 calories. Yin was a more stretching-oriented yoga without an elevated heart rate.
   1. Potential takeaway here is that the mobility plays a bigger part than the exhaustion, when it comes to exercise. Maybe I should think of other mobility exercises, or just try straight-up stretching before bed.

Chin Strap – No result

This chin strap is the one I tried. It did not work.

Nose Vents – No result

These are the ones I tried. They did clear my nasal passages better, but didn’t make a difference in mitigating snoring. They just made my nose breathing louder. I suspected it was because I perhaps ended up snoring through my mouth.

Nose Vents + Chin Strap AT THE SAME TIME – No result

My thought was that the chin strap forces you to breathe through your nose, and the nose vents clear up your nasal passages, so it seems like a genius idea to use them both at once, right? Yeah, well it apparently wasn’t because it made no difference.

Further things I will be testing

Here’s what’s coming up on the list:

1. Moar Yin yoga
2. Proximity of exercise to sleep time — maybe the closer it is to when I go to sleep, the more effective it is
3. Stretching before bed
4. Playing the digeridoo for 20 mins/day (I’m serious)
5. Mobility vs exhaustion as an exercise factor
6. Eating time — earlier vs. later — ate at 6pm vs my usual 9pm on Yin yoga day
7. Netty pot
8. Tennis ball pinned to my shirt to prevent me from rolling onto my back