Sleep Apnea Exercises: How to reduce Obstructice Sleep Apnea
Sleep apnea is a common but serious problem. This condition manifest itself by snoring and most people consider snoring a normal part of life. What they don’t know is that in most cases of sleep apnea, the airflow is blocked by certain factors and this causes a pause in breathing that can happen more than five times in an hour. The pauses in breathing can lower your blood oxygen and increase blood carbon dioxide. These events can increase chances of having cardiovascular disease, stroke, hypertension and diabetes. Moreover, you may also experience fatigue, lack of restful sleep, headaches and poor memory. Sleep apnea exercises can result in some relief and give you a better sleep quantity and quality.
But thankfully, we now have sleep apnea solutions. There are a number of options you can choose from such as surgery and sleep apnea devices. But if you don’t want to go under the knife or snoring devices makes you uncomfortable, then you can choose to do obstructive sleep apnea exercises. Here are some sleep apnea exercises you can incorporate in your daily routine to treat sleep apnea efficiently.
Yoga – this exercise is not only for toning your muscles but can also lower your stress levels and improve your sleep quality. There is this special type of yoga called “Yoga Nidra” which can promote sleep. it uses breathing and visualization techniques to help you calm down at the end of the day. You may search online for this type of exercise and do it every night before bedtime.
Vocalize – try to do vocalizations that focus on exercising your soft palate, palatopharyngeal arch, nasopharynx and tongue. But this exercise is only for types of sleep apnea caused by lax muscles.
Yawning – yawning can also exercise the same muscles when you vocalize. To really stretch the muscles, try yawning a number of times every few minutes.
Tongue exercise – aim to stick your tongue out as far as you can and hold it for a several seconds. Do this repeatedly and regularly and overtime your tongue won’t have to collapse and fall back down your throat which causes you to snore.
Jaw exercise – this exercise will help open your throat better. All you need to do is close your mouth and act like you’re chewing a gum. Do it for a minute or so and make sure that your molars should be moving apart a bit and your lips should be closed the whole time. You may also try making an “mmm” sound.
Some of the sleep apnea exercises may not produce immediate results, yet if you them regularly, you will eventually notice that you won’t snore as much as you do.
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