April 23rd, 2018 is National Stop Snoring Week
#NationalStopSnoringWeek
For anyone who has experienced a partner who snores, they know the sound of snoring is irritating and annoying. It often can lead to sleep deprivation, which in turn can increase the chance of depression.
If your partner snores do they also thrash around?
Sleep apnoea is where someone stops breathing. The thrashing around is due to the body recognising it’s suffocating and moves to breathe again. What many people don’t realise is that sleep apnoea causes cortisol levels to rise. Consequently, their bodies and brains behave as if they were under a huge amount of stress. The cortisol will also make it more likely the person gains more and more weight.
National Stop Snoring Week
NSSW is designed to sort out the occasional snorers who may suffer from allergies or a blocked nose, and with those with apnoea.
Hypnotherapy cannot help with apnoea, only a CPAP machine can do that, but listening to my MP3 can help a person from getting too wound up about the snoring. As a result, people sleep better and can cope better.
Being Overweight
If you’re a snorer because you’re overweight, and it’s pressing down on your windpipe, then you need to lose weight now. That may seem straightforward, but anyone who suffers from disrupted sleep because they are overweight know it’s not.
As a hypnotherapist, I often see people with problems of control. As a nutritional therapist, I see people who are eating foods which are not helping matters. Combined, I help people gain control of their compulsive eating and help them to make the changes to their diets which help them most.
So to start, look at what is driving the weight problem – is it stress? The more stressed you are the more weight you tend to gain. My step by step approach helps you work out how to be more resourceful. You will learn about how the mind and body work, and why sleep is so important. You will learn about the food you eat and what needs to change to achieve the weight loss.
Example
Darren works in the automotive industry. He’s overweight and always has been since a child. He has been on many diets, especially the well-known ones but they haven’t worked long term. For years he has snored. He thrashes around in bed keeping his wife awake, as a consequence she doesn’t sleep well and is now suffering from depression.
His doctors keep telling him to exercise more and lose weight. Consequently, he feels it’s a never-ending battle because he’s too tired to do anything. Prompted by his wife, who told him he stops breathing, he went and asked to be fitted with a CPAP machine. This helped enormously with sleep for both he and his wife. He then decided to tackle the weight problem.
Weight + Snoring = Stress
He discovered that his body was high in cortisol because of the apnoea. As a result, he had to reduce his stress levels, so he came to see me. I helped him over months to get to a place where he had full control of his choices of food. He also started to change his diet slowly over the weeks. Darren found that by cutting back on the foods he’d always been encouraged to eat when on a diet – such as pasta, his weight dropped. He had been on a low-fat diet for years, and he learnt that was part of the cause. Sugar and carbohydrates were the culprits.
Changing his diet to healthy protein, healthy fats such as avocado and oily fish, and lots of vegetables kept him full and started to lose weight fast and then was able to keep it off.
Also, see Sleep problems