“Snoring is a big issue in the community.”
Our Registered Nurse and Snoring Specialist Jenny Matheson truly believes this. In her 20 years’ experience working in intensive care units and her current specialty in snoring treatments, she’s seen people’s health and relationships break down completely due to inadequate sleep, snoring and sleep apnoea.
“Rest is essential to growth” says Nurse Jenny. We sleep in cycles and go into deep REM sleep a few times throughout the night. It’s during this REM stage that our bodies replenish vital hormones and enzymes, carry blood and oxygen to necessary sites, revitalise organs, and generally repair themselves. “I cared for a patient who had to have a liver transplant. He had sleep apnoea for years and what happened was he did not get enough oxygen to the artery that supplies his liver while he slept.”
The most common, yet unexpected issue that Nurse Jenny sees in her work as a Snoring Specialist is the breakdown of relationships. In addition to health problems, snoring and sleep apnoea affect your quality of sleep.
It’s not just that lack of sleep causes irritability and friction, but it also causes difficulty concentrating, which means that you and your partner may not be listening to each other. Without realising it, you could be missing important and even emotional points in your conversations. Does the line “you don’t even listen to me!” sound familiar at all?
“For some patients, it leads to divorce,” Nurse Jenny says. She has many patients who sleep in a separate room to their partner because of their snoring. Their partner gets more sleep and the friction goes away, but eventually, so does the intimacy. These patients often describe how their relationship shifts from being partners to being flatmates. It’s this breakdown of relationships that Nurse Jenny sees as a problem for the community.
Prevention is the best defence. If you or your partner experience snoring and/or sleep apnoea, there are ways to manage and treat it before problems develop.