Sleep apnea or snoring? I tested devices to learn how to stop.

Which brings me back to my own problem. I’m now 36, and it seems the situation has only intensified since my early 30s, which is when I think I really began snoring. That’s around the time my wife started objecting with more vigor.

So my struggle was both specific to me and universal, the hapless snoring partner who was going from nuisance to intolerable nighttime bother.

Unlike many people with this issue, as best as I can tell, there’s a connection between my snoring and one specific life event. When I was 32, I was diagnosed with Type 1 myotonic dystrophy, an adult-onset form of muscular dystrophy. The disease carries a number of symptoms. I’ve had cataract surgery in both eyes, and I have a strange hypersomnolence, a daytime fatigue that tends to affect most people with myotonic dystrophy regardless of whether they snore. But the disease also predisposes people to developing sleep apnea, a condition in which the airway is so obstructed that whatever air you’re breathing in at night doesn’t get to your lungs. Oxygen in the body decreases, carbon dioxide increases, and the brain jolts you awake—usually to the sounds of your gasping for breath. The latest data suggests that anywhere between 30 million and 60 million Americans suffer from apnea. “Most people with sleep apnea do snore, but not everybody who snores has sleep apnea,” Malhotra said. “Snoring, if it’s habitual or it gets very loud consistently—there’s a higher probability of sleep apnea.” I’ve never woken up choking for air, but my disease is also gradually weakening my muscles, including my tongue and the others in my neck. If I’m already snoring, how long until the muscles encasing my airway are feeble enough that they collapse regularly? The last thing I want to hear is that I require a CPAP machine at night.

So my struggle was both specific to me and universal, the hapless snoring partner who was going from nuisance to intolerable nighttime bother. In my case, I feared I was likely only to get worse. I finally resolved last summer to attack the problem with everything I had. Before I relented to getting a sleep study and got stuck dealing with a cumbersome medical intervention, I thought I’d try to get to the root of my sleep issue on my own. Could any of the remedies various entities promised me online—funny devices, positioning myself differently, drinking less—actually end my next-morning reports for good? I surprised myself to learn that maybe I might not need a prod at night to keep the peace. Maybe you don’t either.

Sleep is truly a restorative process in ways science is still working to understand fully. We know that sleep strengthens memories and helps our minds declutter. If you’ve ever gone to bed with a presentation incomplete or a problem unsolved or an article, ahem, not written, then are hit with a burst of creativity in the morning, you can thank sleep for that. A good night’s sleep helps protect against hypertension, decreases stress by lowering cortisol levels, and fights inflammation. Sleep also helps repair cells, a process that has a number of follow-on effects. To name just one: Healthier cells take up glucose more readily, protecting against insulin resistance, which can lead to Type 2 diabetes (yet another condition to which I, and other myotonic dystrophy patients, am predisposed).

Snoring disrupts all of this, according to Alok Sachdeva, a senior staff physician with the Henry Ford Sleep Disorders Center in Detroit. Loud, persistent snoring can cause inflammation in the nose and throat. There is some concern that vibration of the neck’s carotid arteries leads to their narrowing over time, which increases the risk of stroke. And since snorers usually aren’t breathing in enough oxygen, the brain’s normal sleep activity is thrown off. That can cause light, fragmented sleep, which results in feeling more tired during the day.

As I was discovering, people snore for any number of reasons. Age can be one factor. “As we get older, things are just going to get floppier,” Lu said, somewhat abruptly. Obesity is another: The more weight you carry around your neck, the easier it will be for everything encasing your airway to collapse at night. Genetics play a role too: Some people have narrow jaws. Some have narrow noses.

Drinking before bed can also make snoring much worse. Alcohol suppresses the muscles that hold the airway open. “The joke we have is: ‘Do all your drinking in the morning so there’s no alcohol in your system when you go to sleep at night,’ ” Malhotra told me.

I suppose working in print journalism also predisposes me toward booze, but point taken. I started my quest for sounder sleep with a resolution that I wouldn’t touch Jack Daniel’s after 8 p.m. This was … mildly successful. Some evenings I just want a drink, and I wasn’t drinking heavily.

The truth is, as I researched snoring, I deduced rather quickly what was going on with me: I slept with my mouth open. I have a narrow nose, and during the day I don’t think twice about breathing through it. But at night, as I was lying on my back, my mouth would fall open. (Blessings to my wife for collecting some of this reporting data.)

Your chin is connected to your tongue. Your tongue is connected to your jaw. If your mouth is open, gravity pulls your chin backward, and you compress your airway even more. “If you open your mouth, you actually have more propensity to develop even more obstruction,” Lu said.

What you want to do at night is breathe through your nose with your mouth closed. The more air you draw upstream through your nose, Lu said, the more pressure you create downstream to your airway, helping to keep it open. Easier said than done. In the U.S., the market for anti-snoring devices—mouthpieces, nose strips, chin straps, anything that can help a snorer out—is huge. How huge? Try nearly half a billion dollars.

Before I got to all that, I went for the easiest fix first: changing up my sleeping position. But I quickly learned I simply cannot sleep on my side. I’m a back sleeper, and no matter how many times I tried flipping on my side, I’d find myself on my back when the alarm went off in the morning.

OK, fine, I thought: I’ll look at any gizmo that will expand my nostrils. I first tried a silicone nose clip. Picture the letter U being inserted into your nostrils, with a magnet in the middle to keep it pinched to your septum. These did nothing. To this day, I’m still not sure what they were supposed to do. All they did was sit inside my nose, not really pushing the nostrils open, and I still snored. I just went to bed looking as if I had a temporary septum piercing, and a bad one at that.

I needed something more powerful. Enter the chin strap.

The device I found on Amazon hooks around the head and ears and wraps underneath the chin to help keep your mouth closed. The first time I tried it, my wife laughed in my face. I used this device for a few weeks, with moderate success. It was effective in holding my jaw shut, but there were occasions when I’d wake up because of discomfort around the ears—or simply because I wasn’t drawing in enough of a breath through my nose to make sleeping comfortable.

On the recommendation of a friend, I tried yet another potential solution: Breathe Right nasal strips. Anyone who has watched football knows what these are. They fit over the bridge of your nose, the objective being to pull on the skin and cartilage of the nostrils so your nasal passage opens up. The first night I put one on, I could tell a difference almost immediately. I was getting way more air through my nose, even when I lay down. After a week, I was sleeping more comfortably. There also appeared to be some progress. My wife still heard snoring, but it was fleeting, like the propeller of an old prop plane as opposed to my usual Boeing 747 jet blast. Once I was sound asleep, it stopped. (This is probably a good place to mention that my wife takes longer than I do to fall asleep, which is how she’s been able to track all of this for me—and which made figuring out a way to put the brakes on my snoring all the more urgent.)

But what I wanted to do was train myself to keep my mouth shut, without any sort of burdensome device. There are others I investigated and ultimately decided against. Mandibular “appliances” are available for online purchase. You dip them in hot water to soften them, then mold them to your teeth. The idea is, at night, they push your jaw forward, preventing your chin from slipping backward. But I already had a mouth guard I wore at night because I grind my teeth. (Yeah, yeah: one problem at a time.) There are tongue-stabilizing devices, which keep your tongue in place instead of allowing it to slip backward, obstructing the airway. Insert here any crude joke about a prophylactic, and you have an idea of how that device even gets on your tongue.

Ultimately, once I realized that my problem stemmed from my mouth being open, I went into my nights with each new gadget, knowing that if any of them could help me get enough air through my nose, it’d be easier to do the mental feat of focusing on keeping my mouth shut while I slept. Every night when I went to bed, I’d lie there and push my jaw forward, forcing my lips to touch. I’d even clench my teeth (something my dentist might frown upon)—anything that would train me to fall asleep with my mouth closed. Eventually, I was breathing through my nose well enough that I could fall asleep without issue.

There was just one problem with the nasal strips, and that involved taking them off. After three weeks of wearing them, I found that it wasn’t uncommon for people to remark on the redness of the bridge of my nose. I tried to hack this by using a small square bandage, placing that on my nose before affixing the strip. This helped some, but then another issue cropped up. I’d wash and dry my face, place the bandage, position the strip; then I’d wake up, and sometimes, after removing both, I’d see a zit forming on my nose right where the strip had been. Still, I stuck with this routine. I was snoring less and less, a direct result of being able to breathe much more freely. Problem solved, right?

For years, I’ve been trying to piece together my various myotonic dystrophy symptoms and look for solutions to make living with the disease easier. But whether my snoring is a precursor to sleep apnea, or even the evidence for it, is a question I’ve avoided—I couldn’t take another issue. It was time to figure it out. A sleep study was to be the final piece of the puzzle.

I went to a local sleep clinic, where they asked me about my symptoms and gave me a small device that attached to my left thumb. For two consecutive nights I slept with it, all the while having my pulse and oxygen saturation tracked remotely through a smartphone app. About a week later, I got my results. My pulse looked good: At its lowest, my resting heart rate was 49 beats per minute; the average was 69.

The other numbers displayed a little more complexity. My sleep duration was just more than seven hours, but my sleep time—when I was actually sleeping stably, with no interruptions—was just under six hours. More troubling was the analysis of my apnea events, the times at night when I wasn’t breathing. The numbers on the printout I received told me that any obstructive breathing I had was all in the normal range, but there were several times each night when I stopped breathing for anywhere from 11 to 25 seconds. People with severe sleep apnea can sometimes go two minutes without taking a breath.

According to Lu, people can have hundreds of episodes throughout the night when they’re either breathing shallowly (a disorder called hypopnea) or not breathing at all, but they remember only the one time they fully woke up to, say, go to the bathroom. So the brief lack of breathing wasn’t necessarily a problem. But if whatever apnea taking place either shows a dip in your oxygen saturation—how well the hemoglobin in your blood is carrying oxygen to your organs and tissues—or arouses you from sleep, that’s enough to seek further medical treatment. My numbers, fortunately, didn’t look bad. According to my sleep study results, at no point was my oxygen saturation below a healthy 91 percent.

Even better, my Apnea-Hypopnea Index score was good. For our purposes, just understand that the AHI is a metric that sleep doctors use to judge the presence and severity of sleep apnea. Normal sleep results in an AHI that is under five. Mine was four.

The sleep clinic didn’t call me back for any follow-up. Most important, however, was the fact that by the time I took my sleep study, my wife was hearing snoring less and less frequently. I could tell that wearing the nasal strips had significantly improved my nose breathing. The market for these for men is such that Breathe Right, the product my friend recommended to me, has a campaign that declares: “I Strip for My Wife.” I suppose I do.

On that note, if you are a snoring man (or, really, person) reading this, whether or not you have my complications, know that once I pushed past my yearslong avoidance, the answer turned out to be pretty simple. Over these past four years, my disease has encumbered one physical attribute after another—my vision, my stamina, my strength, my ability to type without pain—without an end in sight. What a relief for a fix, for once, not to require a doctor’s referral, an insurance preauthorization, or a massive change to my daily routine. It costs $15 or less, and it’s available at every drugstore.

Soon after my sleep adventures began, I started to notice that my wife’s earplugs were remaining on her nightstand more often. And then, at the end of September, as we sat in our kitchen just after 6 in the morning, waiting for the coffee to brew, she delivered the sort of message I had been waiting to hear.

She pointed to the dog. “He snores more than you,” she said.