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There are three different things that people mix together, and mixing them is how snoring gets sold with fear. They are separated here on purpose. Read all three before you decide which one is yours.
Snoring by itself is usually not dangerous to the person snoring. It is frequently a real problem for the person next to them, and it is sometimes — not always — a sign of a medical condition that is worth diagnosing. Those are three separate statements and none of them implies the others.
This is the most common kind, and the least discussed honestly.
Your snoring is keeping someone else awake. That is a real harm, and it does not become less real because it is not a disease. A partner who has been sleeping badly for years is not being dramatic. Bed partners of loud snorers commonly end up in separate rooms, resentful, or both, and the person who is snoring often has no idea how bad it is because they are asleep for all of it.
On a trip it compresses. Seven nights in one cabin, or four in a shared cabin with people you like but do not live with. Nobody says anything on night one. By night three somebody is sleeping in the lounge.
If this is your situation, this is a solvable social problem and you are in the right place.
And be honest about who is suffering. If your partner is the one losing sleep, the most effective single item may be a good pair of earplugs for them. That is in the kit, and it is in there for a reason.
Some snoring is the audible part of a breathing problem during sleep. Most snoring is not. There is no way to tell from the sound alone, and there is no way to tell from a phone app.
The features that raise the question are the ones in the self-check: witnessed pauses in breathing, gasping or choking awake, heavy daytime sleepiness that does not respond to more time in bed, high blood pressure, larger neck size, age, and a few others.
A loud snorer with none of those features is in a different situation than a loud snorer with several. The point of the self-check is to find out which one you are — not to frighten you, and not to reassure you either. To sort you.
If you screen at higher risk, the answer is an evaluation by a clinician. It is not a bigger kit.
Obstructive sleep apnea — apnea comes from the Greek for “without breath” — is what happens when the airway does not just narrow but closes, repeatedly, while you sleep. Breathing stops for seconds at a time. Your body wakes itself up just enough to restore the muscle tone that reopens the airway, and then you fall back asleep and it happens again.
You have no memory of any of it. What you notice is that you slept eight hours and feel like you did not sleep at all.
This is a diagnosable, treatable medical condition, and it is diagnosed with a sleep study — either in a laboratory or, increasingly, with a device you take home. A physician makes that diagnosis. There are effective treatments, and the most effective one is a form of positive airway pressure — a machine, usually called CPAP, short for continuous positive airway pressure — which holds the airway open with moving air. For many people an oral appliance made by a trained dentist is an alternative worth discussing. Surgery is right for some anatomies. Which one fits you is a conversation with clinicians who have looked at your actual study.
Untreated obstructive sleep apnea is associated with serious health consequences over time, and that is exactly why it is worth diagnosing rather than muffling. The reason this site will not list those consequences in detail is that fear is not the tool here. If the self-check flags you, go get evaluated. If it does not, this section is not about you.
Here is the thing you should know about the category you are shopping in.
Nothing sold for snoring is a treatment for obstructive sleep apnea. Not the strips, not the sprays, not the pillows, not the drugstore mouthpieces, not the kit on this site.
Some of them can make a snorer quieter. Quieter is not the same as breathing better, and a product that silences the noise while the breathing problem continues has made the situation harder to notice, not better.
Snoreguru is written and curated by Michael S. Simmons, DMD, MScMed, MPH, MSc — a practicing dentist in Southern California who has spent forty years on sleep, breathing, and facial pain.
He is an ADA Specialist in Orofacial Pain, a Diplomate of the American Boards of Dental Sleep Medicine and Orofacial Pain — board certified in two specialties — and a Fellow of the American Academy of Orofacial Pain. He was the first dentist ever named a Fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, and served as that Academy's Public Education Ambassador. He has served on the Boards of Directors of the American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine, the California Sleep Society, and the San Fernando Valley Dental Society, a component of the California Dental Association. He has published 48 papers, taught at UCLA for 31 years, and wrote the resolution that produced the American Dental Association's national policy on dentistry's role in sleep-related breathing disorders.
He takes no payment from any manufacturer whose product appears on this site. How that works, in full →