Partners Can Help With Sleep Apnea

Millions of Americans sleep in pairs. This is great for couple intimacy, but it also means you have to put up with each other’s sleeping habits like tossing and turning and snoring. And while sometimes snoring is just something you learn to live with, it can also be a sign of sleep apnea, a condition that causes the airway to close partially or completely and causes both loud snoring and a restless sleep as your body wakes up to avoid suffocating.

But while it’s hard to realize that you have sleep apnea when you sleep alone, it becomes much easier when you sleep with someone who can tell you that you snore, and snore loudly. And while that’s not proof of sleep apnea on its own, it’s worth going in for a diagnosis because of how much the treatment can improve both your own sleep and the sleep of your partner.

A partner can also help when it comes to treating the disorder. You can treat sleep apnea as something that concerns both of you, which it does, and so you can both learn about the condition and its treatments together. You can thus decide together which treatment would work best with how you both sleep and what you’re ready to put up with to end the loud snoring and sleepless nights.

The partner can then help the patient with sleep apnea stick with the treatment. If it’s a mouth appliance, the partner can help make sure it’s clean every night and that it goes in before you go to sleep. If it’s continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy, the partner can help the patient put on the machine and make sure it’s comfortable. Partners can also help patients accept the fact that a good night’s sleep is worth not looking your best in bed.

Sleep apnea is a troubling condition that affects hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. It’s not as bad as some disorders, but you know just how important a good night’s sleep can be once you’ve gone without one for a month or more. So if you think that you or your partner have this condition, you should find out soon so you can start to sleep better at night.