Sleep apnea is a disorder that affects about 25% of men and about 10% of women. It can affect people at any age, including babies, but is more common among those over 50. This potentially dangerous medical condition can have numerous negative consequences on one’s health and lifestyle. Fortunately, a growing amount of evidence shows that meditation can significantly help reduce sleep apnea symptoms and improve one’s life quality.
Meditation helps with sleep apnea because it:
- soothes daytime symptoms such as depression caused by chronic fatigue
- calms you down and makes it easier to fall asleep
- helps you feel comfortable with using a CPAP device
- makes it easier to have a regular sleep routine
- helps with weight loss, and obesity is a frequent reason why people have sleep apnea
- teaches you a more natural way to feel good, without resorting to alcohol, cigarettes, sedatives, and sleeping pills, which are all known to make sleep apnea even worse.
What Is Sleep Apnea
Sleep apnea is a condition where a person stops breathing during sleep even up to hundreds of times in one night. When you stop breathing, your body stops receiving oxygen and this causes your heart rate to drop. Then your involuntary reflexes wake you up, your heart rate speeds up suddenly and your blood pressure rises. If this happens often, you begin to experience chronic effects. If untreated, sleep apnea can cause many health problems including hypertension, heart problems, and diabetes. There is a cause for alarm especially for children with sleep apnea. If left untreated, it has been shown to harm functions of the brain related to mood and cognition.
Symptoms of Sleep Apnea
Symptoms of sleep apnea are snoring, fatigue, restlessness and frequent waking up, gasping and choking followed by waking up suddenly, sore throat or dry mouth after waking up, night sweats and headaches. To see whether you are experiencing these symptoms, the best thing to do is ask someone to sleep next to you so they can check for symptoms. People with sleep apnea snore much louder, take pauses longer than 10 seconds while they breathe, or take shallow breaths. It happens often to those who are overweight, have nose or throat conditions, or neck abnormalities.
Types of Sleep Apnea
There are two types of sleep apnea, obstructive and central. Obstructive sleep apnea is the more common one. It involves frequent blockages in the upper airway. When this happens, the diaphragm and chest muscles have to work more to open the airway. This can then affect the quality of your sleep, so you wake up feeling tired. It also compromises the flow of oxygen into your organs.
In central sleep apnea, there is no airway blockage. Instead, the brain does not signal your muscles to breathe because of the issues in your respiratory control system. Central sleep apnea happens due to the central nervous system’s lack of functionality. This type of sleep apnea can happen to those who have had a stroke or have heart, kidney, or lung problems. For people with central sleep apnea insomnia is common.
How Your Sleep Affects the Rest of Your Life
The quality of your sleep is one of the most important factors to help you keep your energy levels optimal during the day. When your sleep suffers, so does the rest of your day. Not getting the optimal uninterrupted 6-8 hours of sleep can be as unhealthy as poor eating habits and lack of exercise. Sleep problems contribute to memory problems, obesity, depression, anxiety, and sexual dysfunction. Also, lack of quality sleep has also been linked to car accidents, poor academic and work performance, and greater susceptibility to viruses.
How Meditation Helps With Sleep Apnea
- It soothes the daytime symptoms of sleep apnea, such as depression, which chronic fatigue can cause.
- Meditation as well as yoga help strengthen the muscles in your airways and improve your breathing. This in turn increases your sleep quality.
Meditation Is Now Widely Used to Help You Reduce Weight
Excessive bodyweight is one of the most common reasons for sleep apnea. Even an insignificant amount of weight loss can help to open your throat.
We wrote an entire article on how meditation helps with losing weight. We described several techniques so go ahead and try one of them. It might just change your life and how you relate to your body.
Meditation helps you to stop smoking, use alcohol, caffeine, sleeping pills and sedatives
Smoking is known to increase inflammation and fluid retention and thereby contribute to sleep apnea symptoms. There are many reasons why people smoke or form any unhealthy addictions. Meditation helps you understand why the addiction is there and what to do about it. Moreover, it helps you accept and embrace the disowned parts of yourself, the ones you are trying to escape from by using your addiction.
We wrote in more detail how meditation helps with addictions here. And if you have decided to stop smoking or have stopped already, now it’s time to clear your lungs. Here are proven pranayama (breathing) techniques for former smokers’ to detox their lungs.
By using meditation as a natural feel-good solution, you are less likely to turn to alcohol, sleeping pills, and sedatives, all of which relax the throat muscles and affect your breathing rhythm. Meditation trains you to be moderate about your caffeine which for those with sleep apnea are advised not to use 2 hours before sleep.
Regular Habits Help You Maintain a Regular Sleep Routine
Keeping a regular sleep routine helps you sleep better. Meditation as a regular self-maintenance habit makes it easier to make healthy choices about your other daily routines. Once you start with one healthy habit, it becomes easier to include others. Its effects spill over into other parts of your day. That’s why the important thing about including meditation in your day is not how much you do it, but that you just do it. For start, even just 1 minute of conscious deep breathing, or candle gazing is enough. Once you get into the habit of meditating regularly, it’s easier to increase the time invested. That’s also the number 1. rule of many top self-development coaches for including healthy habits or making any constructive changes in your life. If you can’t work out for 15 minutes, just do one pushup. If you can’t wash all the dishes, just wash one.
Science Has Proven That Regular Exercise Helps With Sleep Apnea
Brisk walking and weight training reduce sleep apnea symptoms by 25%, which is as effective as some types of surgery. And what is most amazing is that this 25% symptom reduction didn’t need any bodyweight loss! Moreover, exercise helps reduce the risk of different cardiovascular diseases, which those with sleep apnea are more prone to.
Including mindfulness and movement meditation into your exercise program will help you greatly stick to and enjoy this healthy habit. By focusing on your breath, the sensations of the body and how good the exercise feels instead of spacing out, you will get out of the vicious circle of negative, anxiety and stressful thoughts that can follow exercise if you are not feeling up for it.
Aside from sleeping better and being more fit, your fitness habits can also help save the environment! Here’s how.
Meditation for Sleep Apnea
The following sleep meditation script for been adapted from InsightTimer. You can either listen to it on their website or ask someone you love to record it for you or perhaps even record it yourself:
Get comfortable and ready for sleep. Lie in any position that feels comfortable for you. Begin by quickly tensing your legs for a few seconds and then release. Next, tense your arms, your whole arms, and relax them as well. Now tense your head and your neck and face really tight and let go. Tense your torso and your pelvis as hard as you can and release them as well. Finally, tense your whole body for a few seconds and as you relax it, feel you are letting go of any stress or tension.
Shift your awareness to how your body is feeling now and how more relaxed you are after having done this exercise. Your body is becoming more and more relaxed. Now, become aware of your breath.
Being to notice your breathing, and if it feels good, start taking deep, deep breaths right expanding your belly as wide as you can. And as you exhale, let out a sigh and bring your belly button closer to the spine, as much as it feels right. And keep breathing like this for a few seconds. With each next exhale make a sound of any kind to allow yourself to release that old, stale air from your body.
Relaxing Your Face
And now just relax, breathing naturally. And as you breathe, allow a sense of soothing to radiate all around your eyes. See if you can actually feel your eyelids relax. Feel how incredible it is that with just a little bit of mindfulness you can feel your body relax. And now imagine those gentle sensations of letting go move across your forehead and your scalp. Feel the back of your head relax, your cheeks and nose, your mouth and chin, and all around your jaw, those muscles just let go. You can feel all the tension simply flowing out of your face.
Relaxing Your Body
And as you take your next breath, imagine that your breath is traveling to the back of your neck and gently relaxing your muscles there. All that soothing breath flowing down your neck and across your shoulders… Let this feeling of relaxation radiate deep into your shoulders. Feel your shoulders drop feeling heavy and allow them to sink into the support beneath you. Imagine that any tension you’ve held in your shoulders simply flows out of your shoulders into the Earth beneath you. You are relaxed and at peace.
With your next breath, imagine that this breath carries that feeling of relaxation across your shoulders and your chest. It flows down your arms through your elbows and your forearms, soothing and easing as that sense of relaxation in your breath flows through your wrists and hands and out the tips of your fingers.
With every breath, you feel your muscles relaxing and letting go. Tension flowing out of you and into the Earth. And with your next breath feel that relaxation travels across your belly and around your sides and ribs to your back as you relax even more deeply.
Allow this deep relaxation to flow down into your hips and your glutes and your thighs feeling those powerful muscles open and relax. And see if you can feel that relaxation as a melting sensation spreading down your knees and calves, ankles, and feet. Imagine your toes completely relaxed. Breathing slowly and deeply. You are safe and at peace. Now taking a nice, deep breath, send that breath throughout your entire body, from your head to your toes, soothing and relaxing that breath, that fresh oxygen, healing every cell in your body.
Allowing
Your body knows that you cannot force it to relax, you can only allow it to relax. Trust your body completely. It knows that all it takes for this incredible sense of well-being in any given moment is soft intentional breathing.
Savor how good it feels to just breathe. And with one last breath, allow all thoughts and feelings and sensations to move through your awareness as easily as that breath that you exhale. Your body is heavy, your mind is still, and you are incredibly relaxed.
Conclusion: Meditation Is Proven to Help Reduce Sleep Apnea Symptoms
Sleep apnea is a potentially dangerous medical condition that can wreak havoc on your health and life quality. Meditation has been proven to help ease many of its symptoms, namely fatigue, poor sleep quality, stress, and anxiety and it also helps with reducing body weight, taking up exercise, and other healthy life habits, all of which are associated with a reduction in symptoms of sleep apnea.
Tatjana Glogovac, Senior Contributor At L’Aquila Active
Learn more about Tatjana by reading her bio below.
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