There is nothing that I hate more than snoring.  My father just happens to be the loudest snorer I know and it drives me nuts.  When we went on a family cruise I put tissues in my ears to try to block out the sound.  I’m lucky enough to have a roommate that doesn’t snore.  I even asked her before I met her if she snores due to the fact that it really drives me insane.  Why do we snore in the first place?  Is snoring loudly a bad thing?  Lastly, does snoring have an affect on people’s marriages?

Snoring is more than just breathing heavily.  First off, Dr. Neil B Kavey, Director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Columbia University, explains what is really happening when we snore.  He first claims that snoring is the “vibration of relaxed, floppy tissues that line the upper airway”( Why).  Dr. Kavey then goes into depth about how the sound is really produced by stating, “When you sleep, muscle tone throughout your body decreases.  All the muscles in your body relax.  Your upper airway is lined with muscles that keep the airway open.  When those muscles relax during sleep, the diameter of the airway decreases and in some people, this partially blocks the airflow, leading to turbulence.  Instead of air flowing smoothly down the airway into the lungs, it flows with gusts and bursts.  As the air travels through the airway, it picks up speed and gets whipped around in all different directions.  As the air bounces around, it hits the relaxed, floppy tissues lining the throat and causes them to vibrate, kind of like a flag in the wind.  This is the snoring sound” (Why).  In simpler terms, when we go to sleep and our muscles relax the airway becomes smaller and basically blocks the airflow.  Once the air travels, it hits the lining of the throat causing the snoring to occur. Some may ask, why don’t we snore when we are awake?  The answer to that question as Doctor Kavey describes it is that, “People don’t make a snoring sound when they are awake because the muscles in the throat hold the airway open wide enough for a smooth flow of air into the lungs” (Why).  This I find very interesting. I have never thought about why we don’t snore during the day, but I am thankful that we don’t.  Now that we have an in depth explanation as to why we snore, we will transition and see if snoring loudly is a bad thing.

My father as I mentioned before snores so loudly that I can hear him every night from my bedroom at the end of the hallway.  In order to escape the sound that he makes, I sleep with a noise machine.  Yes, I know that it may sound dramatic, but there is nothing more I hate in the world beside snoring. There was an interesting study done by a well known institution (University of Pittsburgh.. PSU is better by the way) where they surveyed 800 participants.  The researchers asked the participants who ranged from the ages of 45 to 74 about the quality of their sleep.  They found that, “Three years later, the people who reported snoring loudly were more than twice as likely as quiet sleepers to have metabolic syndrome — a cluster of risk factors for heart disease, diabetes, and stroke that includes high blood pressure, high blood sugar, low “good” cholesterol, high triglycerides, and excess belly fat” ( Gardner).  Although I do find this study very interesting, I do take into consideration that eight hundred people is a very large sample size and that all these people could be from different socioeconomic backgrounds and therefore third variables could affect the reason they got this disease.  For example, say a person that was surveyed was from a poor area and only could afford junk food and fast food.  This would cause increased cholesterol and body fat. However, personally I do believe that the study is pretty accurate because if you think about it logically, snoring can keep you up at night and a lack of sleep leads to many health problems.  Sleep is important and when your partner sleeping next to you snores, getting enough sleep for yourself becomes a problem.

All and all, it’s very clear that we all snore and we don’t just do it because we are very tired.  Though everyone doesn’t snore, studies are finding that those who snore loudly are experiencing health problems down the line.  Personally, I’m just glad that my roommate and I both don’t snore and that I don’t have to listen to my Dad snore at home anymore!

Works Cited

 Gardner, Amanda, and Copyright Health Magazine 2011. “Snoring, Sleep Problems May

Signal Heart Risk.” CNN. Cable News Network, 01 Dec. 2010. Web. 22 Oct. 2015.

F.A.C.S., David Volpi M.D. P.C. “How Snoring Can Wreak Havoc On A Marriage.” The

Huffington Post. The Huffington Post.com, n.d. Web. 22 Oct. 2015.

 “Why Do We Snore?” Msnbc.com. N.p., 27 Jan. 1999. Web. 21 Oct. 2015