Nighttime Symptoms of Sleep Apnea

Sleep apnea is a common but serious disorder which causes your breathing to start and stop during the night. Beyond just annoying your bed partner with your loud snoring, your sleep is rarely restful, leaving you exhausted during the day, which can have far-reaching consequences for your career and your personal life. Additionally, sleep apnea can damage your health, leading to weight gain, depression, diabetes, heart disease, and liver problems.

With so many negative consequences of sleep apnea, we want to know whether or not we have it. The biggest problem here is that the main symptoms of sleep apnea happen while you’re asleep, so it’s difficult to know if you’re exhibiting those symptoms. While you can ask your bed partner to monitor you, they will likely fall asleep eventually and need their rest, as well. Recording audio while you sleep is a better choice, but sifting through eight hours of audio can be a pain.

Instead, you can download an audio recording app like this one that only starts recording when it hears sounds. That way, the audio you have to listen to will be limited to just the important parts.

Once you have your recordings, start listening for:

• Exceptionally loud snoring for most of the night, every night
• Pauses in breathing
• Choking or gasping sounds

Since these are the main symptoms of starting and stopping breathing during the night, if you find them in your audio, you may have sleep apnea.

In addition to these symptoms you will only notice if you record yourself sleeping, you can also start tracking how often you experience the following:

• Frequently using the bathroom during the night
• Waking up out of breath
• Insomnia
• Restless sleep

These are also symptoms of sleep apnea. If you experience any of these, in addition to some or all of the symptoms found in your audio recordings, you may very likely have sleep apnea. Because sleep apnea is a very serious disorder, you should contact a doctor as soon as possible.

At Silent Night Therapy, we are committed to helping you get the best sleep of your life. Our oral sleep appliance team is dedicated to helping people who suffer from sleep apnea. To learn more about what we can do for you, contact our New York offices today by calling (631) 983-2463.