Do you always feel tired during the day? Does your husband or wife complain about your snoring? Do you wake up with headaches or suffer from high blood pressure? While not guaranteed, answering yes to any of these questions might be a sign that you have sleep apnea, otherwise known as Obstructive Sleep Apnea or OSA for short.

Sleep Apnea is a potentially life threatening condition that involves pauses or decreases in breathing while sleeping. Most often the condition is a result of an airway restriction. Try and imagine for a second that you are drinking a milkshake through a straw, if suck on the straw too hard it will begin to restrict and slow or prevent the flow of the shake. Your air passages do something while breathing at night. In many cases, this restriction in the airway is inherited and starts in childhood.

Many people often wonder why they can breathe fine during the day, but suffer from sleep apnea at night. Well, at night the muscles in your throat become relaxed and your brain is not as attentive to the airway. So while you are breathing, the air passage walls can either completely restrict or significantly narrow to a point that you are not getting enough air. There are a couple of problems with this in that the body must struggle to breathe and the brain has to “wake up” to reopen the airway, which can leave you tired and irritable the following day.

Some people find that using a sleep apnea pillow and sleeping on their side can help to keep the airways from becoming restricted. However, these types of treatments are usually only effective in mild cases of sleep apnea.

Numerous studies have shown that patients with sleep apnea can wake-up thirty times or more every hour, while not remembering these periods in the morning. In order to fully benefit from your sleep, it needs to be continuous without interruption. When you wake up frequently through the night you may experience symptoms such as daytime sleepiness, difficulty remembering things, difficulty concentrating, emotional problems which includes depression and irritability and many more.

In addition to the above problems there are also much more serious consequences such as excess strain on your heart which can cause a heart attack, high blood pressure and even stroke. Diabetes can also be an issue in sleep apnea patients.

If you are suffering with sleep apnea, you may also want to read our article, is there a cure for sleep apnea.