Snoring aids are a very useful and effective way to treat the problem of snoring. They are also easy to obtain and, once you find the right one, very reliable. One drawback to them, however, is that if you are still using an anti-snoring pillow, for example, you are still faced with the fact that the underlying physical cause of your snoring is still there, it’s just being dealt with by your snoring aid.
There is another way to deal with this general problem- exercise. Now, I don’t just mean exercise in general, although both snoring and the rather more serious variant, sleep apnea have been found to have a link to obesity. Whilst it’s always a good idea to get out and active a few times a week, it is also possible to tone up those areas of your body most involved in the production of those irritating rasping sounds at night.
The benefit of specific exercise is a strengthening of the muscles around your mouth and throat, as one common cause of snoring is weakness or softness in the tissues surrounding the breathing passages. If you can strengthen these, then you’ll find that that’ll help you snore a lot less.
There are two main types of exercise, which use the tongue and the voice. To exercise the tongue, it’s like exercising any other muscle- you need to move it, tense it, and hold it still. Try sticking your tongue out as far as it will go, holding it for ten seconds, and then relaxing and repeating. A set of ten of those, followed the same process only sticking the tongue out and pushing upwards to touch your nose, will go a long way to improving the muscle tone of your tongue.
To improve your throat muscles, you can use vocal training, in the same way an actor or a singer would. Learn a set of scales (this can be as simple as the classic ‘doh-ray-me-fah-so-la-te-doh’ of Sound of Music fame, and there are a lot of instruction videos online) and repeat them, holding each note for a few seconds as you sing it and concentrating on the muscles of the neck and throat.
You’ll find that as time goes on, you’ll get better and better at this, and you’ll also start to feel like you can breathe more easily. This will, hopefully, have quite an impact on your snoring, too.
If you persist with these exercises, it won’t take long at all to see a difference in your snoring.
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