How to stop snoring

Find out which kind of snorer you are

Before trying anything, spend a week measuring. The three questions worth answering are simple: how much of the night do you spend on your back, is your nose blocked at night, and do you sleep with your mouth open.

These three split most snorers into groups that respond to completely different measures. A positional snorer can often halve their snoring by staying off their back. Someone with a blocked nose will get nothing from a side pillow and a lot from treating the congestion first.

• Positional: snoring is much worse on your back than on your side
• Nasal: your nose is blocked, you breathe through your mouth, you wake with a dry mouth
• Anatomical or weight-related: snoring is loud in every position
• Substance-related: it is much worse after alcohol or a late heavy meal

Positional measures: the highest return for most people

Sleeping on your back lets the tongue and soft palate fall towards the back of the throat. For many people this is the single biggest factor, and it is also the easiest to measure — a wrist accelerometer can tell you what share of the night you spent supine.

The measures range from free to fiddly. The tennis ball technique — a ball sewn into a pocket on the back of your pyjama top — is the cheapest form of positional therapy and works for a lot of people once they get used to it. Side-sleeper pillows and vibrating positional trainers do the same job with more comfort and more cost.

• Tennis ball technique: nearly free, takes a few nights to get used to
• Side-sleeper or anti-snore pillow: supports the head and shoulder, discourages rolling back
• Positional trainer: vibrates when you turn onto your back
• Raising the head of the bed: mixed evidence, but some people respond

Randomised trials of positional therapy show a clear reduction in time spent supine and in snoring for people whose snoring is position-dependent. If yours is not, these measures will do very little — which is why measuring first matters.

Nasal measures when the nose is the problem

If you cannot breathe comfortably through your nose with your mouth closed, air is being pulled through a narrow path and the soft tissue behind it vibrates. Nasal strips and internal dilators widen the entrance; saline rinses and, where a clinician agrees, a steroid spray treat the congestion itself.

Expect modest effects if congestion is not your main problem. Nasal dilators help nasal snorers and do close to nothing for everyone else — another reason not to buy a drawer full of devices before you know your pattern.

Alcohol, late meals and weight

Alcohol relaxes the muscles of the throat, which narrows the airway. The effect is measurable and it is larger in people who already snore. Three to four hours between the last drink and sleep is the usual advice, and it is easy to test: mark the nights you drank and compare them with the nights you did not.

A heavy meal close to bedtime has a similar, smaller effect. Weight is the slowest lever and the most powerful one: fat around the neck narrows the airway from the outside, and weight loss has the best long-term evidence of any measure here. It is also the one that takes months rather than nights.

Throat exercises and oral appliances

Daily exercises for the tongue, palate and throat muscles — pressing and sliding the tongue along the palate, holding certain vowel sounds, puffing the cheeks — cut snoring frequency by about a third in a three-month randomised trial. They cost nothing and take about ten minutes a day, but they need eight to twelve weeks before anything shows.

Mandibular advancement devices hold the lower jaw slightly forward and have good evidence behind them. A device fitted by a dentist works better and is kinder to your teeth and jaw than a boil-and-bite one from a chemist. If you grind your teeth or have jaw pain, talk to a dentist before buying anything.

Test one thing at a time, and measure it

The reason snoring advice feels useless is that people try four things at once for three nights and then stop. A measure that reduces snoring by a quarter will not be obvious over three nights of normal variation.

Pick one measure. Record a week without it, then a week with it, and compare the same numbers: minutes of snoring per night, average loudness, and how rested you felt. Loir does this as a built-in experiment, but a notebook works too. The discipline matters more than the tool.

If snoring is loud every night regardless of position, if someone has seen you stop breathing, or if you are exhausted during the day despite enough sleep, stop experimenting and talk to a doctor. Those are the signs that need a proper assessment rather than a pillow.