Thomas, my husband, and I have been using an app for our iPhones called SleepCycle for years now. I got it mainly because I don’t like being awoken to really loud, noisy alarms and wanted to track how much sleep I got nightly. The SleepCycle app has an alarm that gently wakes you up by playing music at a low volume and getting slightly louder over time. It’s a very nice way to wake up for the day. It also tracks how much sleep you get overnight and how much of that sleep is quality sleep. (Man…I’m saying sleep a lot!) Over the years, SleepCycle has made improvements to their app, one of which tracks how much snoring you do while sleeping.
One night a month ago, I was asleep for approximately eight hours and snored for almost five!! I had been feeling really tired, which is nothing new for me…a whole other story. I knew that all this snoring wasn’t helping me feel less tired and I was tired of feeling tired. I had already quit drinking on the weekends…again, a whole other story…and now it was time to try a new way to feel less tired. (Now I’m saying tired a lot!)
I do want to interject here that I lost my just turned 19 year old son, Jake, to suicide and depression on December 30, 2020. I’m sure that has impacted my sleep over the last few months. To be clear, I did have a lot of fear going to bed many of those first weeks because I would lay there and think about him and all the things we could have done differently and silently mourned my son on a tear stained pillow. I hated nights and how I felt so emotionally alone and raw, even though I was lying next to the only other person who felt my pain.
There is a yoga instructor in Winchester, KY that I am Facebook friends with, but we weren’t really ever friends in high school. I believe that we met in passing at some church function when I first moved to Winchester my freshman year. Her name is Erin and she owns OM Place. She did a post on meditation and how to use your fingers for concentration while meditating. Basically, you tap each finger to your thumb from the index finger to the pinky back to your index finger (OR switch it up and go pinky to index finger…get crazy!). I have done a few sessions of quick meditation using that technique. It really worked for me and made the session go by very quickly with limited extraneous thoughts. I used this technique on my chest to try to calm myself to go to sleep and give myself something else to focus on besides guilt and sadness over the loss of my son. It worked very well. Finally, I was able to move past the fear of going to bed only to be haunted by my lost son. I still think of Jake, all day, every day, but I’m not allowing my brain to deprive me of the much needed sleep required to deal with this emotional post traumatic stress.
I know I have gotten a little off topic here, but I felt that it was important to note some of the struggle I’d been wrestling with in order to get some sleep. I did some research about snoring, which, of course, says that I have to lose weight. I’m overweight. I have been overweight since my first kid…27 years ago. I went on to have four more kids. I feel like I gained an additional ten pounds with each subsequent kid and it got harder and harder to get the weight off. Continued research showed that I may have a deviated septum, I mean I have been a light snorer since I was in middle school (thanks girlfriends for pointing it out after sleepovers!). The heavier I’ve gotten, the louder and more frequently I snore. My grandma could blow the roof off of the house. Okay…lose weight, got it, deviated septum, got it, possible allergies, got it. I found that maybe I could alter the way I sleep by sleeping at a slight angle. I did some research on bed wedges. Got one! Nasal strips can help with the deviated septum. Hmmm…nasal strips. I was on the fence about those because I wasn’t sure how great the adhesive would be for my face. I chose to try it out and see if it worked. Our next pickup grocery order at Kroger included nasal strips. I had my two tools that would help me begin my fight against snoring and obtaining optimal sleep!
I had the wedge for a few days before I got the nasal strips. It did cut down my snoring a bit, but adding the nasal strips cut it in half! Next, it was time to start getting to bed earlier. Late February I began walking on a newly purchased treadmill, gotten because Thomas was outside in a deep freeze walking over frozen snow and ice. I couldn’t let him do that anymore. It was so cold out they were predicting frost bite if skin was exposed for more than 15 minutes to the cold! I didn’t want him to slip and fall either. I pushed for that treadmill and promised that I would use it and finally begin exercising again. It was expensive, but we’d saved so much money not paying for our gym membership because of covid this last year that it seemed like a sensible purchase. Happy Valentine’s Day!! That first week, I was really tired from staying up too late drinking and vowed to quit from that point forward. A week later, I’ve been walking every day without fail. The week before last I was able to get myself to lay down by 11 pm and I was feeling good! Plenty of time in bed! Bed wedge! Nasal strip! Exercise! It was all working out at last! Then…duh, duh, duh…daylight savings time happened. Sigh…I hadn’t accounted for that and it threw me for a loop.
I had started body weight workouts from a website called darebee.com at the beginning of February. I had big plans for 2021, but they were thrown to the wind after Jake’s death. After a month of endless sorrow, I decided to use February as my new time to make some change. I thought exercise would cause me to get tired and help with my grief, sadness, and sleep loss. (PSA: Darebee.com offers all kinds of programs for body weight training and it’s all absolutely free. They do work on a donation basis, so please give if using their services.) I started on February 1, but by the 12th I was feeling poorly from the drinking and loss of sleep. The next week was when I started walking on the treadmill again and I was determined to finish my 30 day Foundation Light Program. I had twelve days in and eighteen to finish. I started doing two workouts a day. Needless to say, I was tired, but I finished that 30 day program by February 28th! March 1st I started the Foundation program, did two workouts a day (with two days of three workouts to catch up) and finished that in two weeks. On March 15th, I started a new workout called Totals. Tuesday had me doing 100 high knees and 100 jumping jacks. Well…that was tough on this old, overweight broad. My knees are kinda crap, so I had to space it out throughout the whole day. The high knees give me shin splints if I do more than ten at a time. I finished, but between the DST and this new program, I was toast. I took a two hour nap on Wednesday! I haven’t done a body weight session or any yoga since Tuesday. Time to try to catch back up on my sleep. I was really looking forward to sleeping in this weekend!
This morning, I woke up at 9:30. I did go to bed about 12:30, but I got nine hours of total sleep, seven of which were quality sleep hours. Yes! To boot, my SleepCycle tracked only 16 minutes of snoring!! My mind was blown! I feel great! Over the last month, my snoring has been decreasing to around 90 minutes throughout the night, but this was incredible! The moral of the story is that it can take decades to figure out problems, but a minimal amount of time to try to determine how to fix them. After this weekend, I’ll be getting to bed by 11 pm so that I can get up at 7 am, walk, do my workouts, and have my yoga session not feeling super tired. My initial need to incessantly eat after beginning to work out again has passed. It’s time to focus on my food intake. Maybe with some weight loss I can be almost completely snore free!!