They BOTH snore — so could this sleep starved couple find a cure?
Chin straps to keep your mouth shut. A wristband that gives electric shocks . . .
For nearly 20 years, my husband Jonathan and I have happily shared a marital bed — and with the late-night partying and early parenting years behind us, we should be getting the best sleep of our lives.
But we’re not. There’s a new interloper between our crisp cotton sheets — the sonorous rumble and snort of heavy snoring. From both of us.
I’m 49 and Jon, a design consultant, is 50. We’re not overweight, we’re healthy and fit, but the snorts and gasps have become ridiculous. It’s a race to hit the pillow every night, as whoever drops off to sleep first wins — leaving the other with no choice but to lie there and endure the cacophony.
our friends also complain about their partners’ snoring (although it’s usually the women moaning about their men, not a mutual moanathon like ours) and there’s a lot of talk about the slippery slope to separate rooms. In fact, two in five Britons say their partner’s snoring robs them of sleep, with one in five claiming it leaves them permanently exhausted.
So Jon and I decide to try a different antisnoring device each night for a week. Will we find one that leaves us well-rested, or will we feel more sleep-deprived than ever?
SHE SAYS:
I USUALLY f all asleep really quickly — Jon will half- jokingly count me down ‘ ten, nine, eight…’ and I rarely hear him say f i ve. But my nights are ruined l ater, when I’m jolted awake by the sound of a JCB digger from his side of the bed. And it’s worse when he’s had a few drinks.
At times, I’ve banished him to a pull-out bed in one of the kids’ rooms, but that’s now out of bounds as they complain his snoring keeps them awake. our youngest has even resorted to wearing earplugs.
When I present Jon with our goody bag of snoring gadgets, he is thoroughly disdainful, muttering grumpily about snake oil and hocus-pocus. But he eventually selects his first weapon — SnoreBand Nasal Strips (£4.95 for a pack of 30), which you tape over the bridge of your nose.
These claim to stop your nostrils collapsing as you breathe at night — a common problem that can cause you to breathe (and therefore snore) through your mouth. Jon says the strips do seem to keep his nostrils open — but sadly his snoring doesn’t improve.
The following night he tries Nasi-Vent (£21.96 for four reusable tubes in different sizes). The idea is that you insert one of the hollow silicone tubes into each nostril to keep them open — maximizing airflow and encouraging you to breathe through your nose. But this device, too, has precisely zero impact on Jon’s snoring.
It’s the same result on the third night with the Good Night Anti-Snoring ring (£35, in sizes small, medium or large) which has to be worn on a little finger. The bumps on the inside of the ring put pressure on acupuncture points, which apparently stimulates the zones that free-up the nasal passages and adjust ‘natural biorhythms’.
Even l ess successful i s the Snoring Solutions Jaw Strap (£ 17.50), which an extremely reluctant Jon lets me strap him into on the fourth night.
This piece of rubber, with adjustable Velcro straps, is cunningly fashioned to keep your mouth firmly shut and your jaw pulled forwards. This supposedly stops the soft palate at the back of your throat collapsing down to close off your airway (the most common source of extreme snore volume).
But Jon thinks he l ooks so ridiculous, he rips it off in disgust before falling asleep.
He i s more keen to try the orthopaedic Anti Snore Pillow (£16.99) on the fifth night. This supports your neck to encourage you to lie on your back — keeping your j aw f rom dropping i nto maximum snore-volume mode.
Jon wakes in the morning and declares it a great success. But unbeknown to him, I’ve downloaded an ingenious app called SnoreLab on my mobile phone (the best £1.49 I’ve ever spent).
It records your snoring and produces a graph in the morning with peaks and troughs indicating your snore volume and duration. And, at the touch of a button, you get to hear what you sound like in full nocturnal song.
Jon’s graph reveals a long series of extremely high snoring peaks (above ‘loud’ and bordering on ‘epic’ on the SnoreLab volume scale). That comfy pillow was clearly no match for a bottle of Cotes du rhone and a good set of lungs.
The f ollowing night, Jon is surprisingly happy to give the Nytol Anti-Snoring Throat Spray (£12.99) a try, saying its deeply medicinal smell gives him faith that it actually might work.
This product is a cross between shaving foam and spray cream, and you squirt it into the back of your mouth. It contains seaweed and rosehip extract that supposedly lubricate and soothe any tissue swelling — thus reducing the vibrations that cause snoring.
Jon certainly comes to bed with delightfully fresh breath and — to my astonishment — both of us enjoy the soundest, most snorefree sleep we’ve had for a very long time.
So the Nytol is a keeper. But Jon is determined to hang on to his beloved anti- snore pillow in the hope the combination of the two will give him the best chance of keeping his inner warthog at bay.
HE SAYS:
I doN’T think my snoring is a problem. It doesn’t bother me, except for when I very occasionally snort myself awake, or when I (more commonly) get woken by a swift kick to the shins from Louise. The real problem is having to lie there listening to her snoring. My wife’s repertoire ranges from an over-content purring cat to a clapped- out datsun that’s missing an exhaust. She also has the ability to rattle and splutter on the out-breath as well as the in.
And I’m worried about her sleep apnoea — a condition where the throat muscles relax during sleep, causing the breathing to temporarily stop.
In Louise’s case, her breathing becomes more and more intermittent until she goes into full-blown apnoea arrest and stops breathing for up to 25 seconds.
At this stage I have CPr drills running through my head and often think: ‘Is she dead?’ Then, just as I’m about to shake her, she’ll take a huge gasp of air and get on with the proper job of snoring again. It can’t be healthy — for either of us. So Louise is the first to take a really tough one for the team and try the ‘face-bra’, or Jaw Strap.
Even though it pushes her lips into a sexy ‘selfie’ pout, it’s a total passion killer. And in the morning I wake to find a stream of dribble trickling out of her forcibly closed mouth — and a good solid snore resonating f rom her throat. Neither of us had any idea she could snore so successfully with her mouth closed.
I’m not convinced that having either one of us trussed up like Hannibal Lecter is going to help things — and it certainly won’t add sparkle to our sex life.
The next night, things are even worse. Louise emerges from the bathroom smiling alluringly, then opens her mouth to reveal a monstrous plastic gum-shield clenched over her top and bottom teeth. This SnoreWizard (£44.99) pulls the bottom jaw forwards all night, keeping the airway past the soft palate clear.
Apparently, this is the bit where the loudest snoring is produced and which, in Louise’s case, sometimes collapses, causing her to stop breathing.
But she lies awake (so not snoring — bonus?), complaining that it has triggered a striking pain in her lower jaw and intolerable pressure on her top front teeth. She ditches it to get some shuteye.
Next on her list is Snore Gone (£10.45), a battery-powered unit the size of a large watch. You wear it on your wrist, and it helpfully delivers a prickle of electrical current to your arm when it detects snoring. This supposedly wakes you, so you’ll turn over.
It’s a barbaric instrument of torture, if you ask me, and superfluous. Why do either of us need electric shocks when the other is perfectly happy to kick or prod (both effective wake-up devices)?
Besides, we can snore in any position — on our back, on either side, even face- down — so changing position is hardly going to help.
Unsurprisingly, that one didn’t last the night either.
The Anti-Snoring ring is as ineffectual for Louise as it is for me, and the Nasal Strips and NasiVent tubes don’t work either. relief, when it finally comes, is in chemical form — the Helps Stop Snoring Throat rinse and Throat Spray (£7.15 each).
After swilling and gargling with the rinse and blasting the back of her throat with the bitter-tasting spray, Louise had her best night’s sleep in ages — and so did I.
The products contain essential oils that ‘lubricate and tone’ the soft tissues at the back of the throat, stopping them from vibrating and collapsing.
Louise also tried the Nytol spray but it made her retch.
This has been an interesting week, involving torture and humiliation, but hard evidence from the SnoreLab app reveals that both of us can sleep through deafening noises from the other — and there’s always the throat spray and mouth wash to freshen every snoring breath.