If you live with sleep apnea or believe in having it, life can be challenging. Certain obstacles living with a condition like this puts an individual through. Insomnia is among one the most common of these symptoms that only worsens with time. Sudden to long periods of of breathing while asleep are another. This can become fatal over time if the condition worsens to such a degree.
Many people counteract it with diet and exercise and even with sleep apparatuses that allow the patient to breathe safely and easily without the worry of bouts without breathing. Having science and technology available has allowed doctors and scientists to study sleep apnea closely to help learn about it more, as much is still to be known about the condition. In this read, you will discover what sleep trackers can tell you about sleep apnea to give further insight into how to understand this phenomenon.
Your Total Sleep Duration While Resting
One of the most important things you can do for your health is ensure you have a good night’s rest, yet many people worldwide suffer from sleep. Some people claim that the quality of your sleep matters more than the duration, yet others claim that the amount of time you sleep is equally important. Both are true and hold their own weight when considering what they do for your health. The quality allows your body and mind to restore themselves fully, while time helps give you energy repair you and prepare you for the day ahead. Sleep trackers can look at these durations through your sleeping patterns nightly to help determine the severity and prognosis of the condition.
The Sleep Quality That You Achieve
Trackers can also determine the quality of your sleep. Different factors allow the determination, such as the phases, length of sleep periods, and overall health while under monitoring. Depending on the duration of your sleep cycles is one factor, but knowing how your vital signs and well-being are faring is another thing. When you stop breathing due to sleep apnea, it will send your oxygen levels plummeting, affecting your brain waves and even your blood pressure. Over time this could become serious and damaging to your overall health, which is why it’s considered a medical condition.
Sleeping Through the Phases
You should fall into different phases during your sleep cycle as you sleep. You will initially be in the lightest phase during the first phase. While in this phase, you can still be easily startled as your brain function is still very active, and your brain waves have only partially slowed down to allow you to relax your body. However, your mind is still almost as equally as active as it would be if you were actively awake. The next phase is deeper sleep, where your brain waves are slower than before, and you are halfway between sleeping and waking, which most people consider the moments before they start to dream and truly sleep their deepest. The final stage is a deep sleep that involves rapid eye movement, or REM, as many refer to it. During this phase, the brain waves are much lower, allowing the body to relax completely, and the conscious mind is also now relaxed, while the subconscious mind is actively producing dreams.
Environmental Factors That Affect You
Some people need help getting settled in at night due to several factors. There could be noisy neighbors, pets, or children. But no matter what the reason is, things in our environment affect us every day with our productivity and even our sleep. If these things are consistently present, you can’t expect the condition to heal itself potentially. So, one method of helping to alleviate some of these stressors is to sleep at different hours or use different techniques for sleeping. You could try sleeping on a different side of your house, sleeping alone instead of with someone if you share a bed, and ensuring your pet is comfortable and sleeping before you pass out.
What Lifestyle Means for Sleep
It can be hard to wind down after an active day when you haven’t had a moment to spare. These days can string along after a time to become a lifestyle that eventually affects how people sleep and cause them to change their sleeping patterns. Some sleeping devices will have you log your lifestyle along with the typical demographics of sleeping such as time and quality. This extra information will help determine whether the individual has sleep apnea. A good way of measuring this, which many doctors utilize, is by having the patient spend the night in the clinic and sleep away from their normal environment. You can resource the snoring clinic in Houston as an example of what you should look for to have these tests done when you’re ready.
Taking a Look at Your Sleep History
Another great benefit to sleep tracking is that you work on an active sleep history while being monitored. After a while, you’ll develop a record, and a physician will determine and deal with whether good or bad. However, this is only possible with the tracking that creates your sleep history. After several weeks of consistent sleep patterns without any change, the physician can provide all the information they will likely need for a diagnosis.
The Importance of Your Respirations
Above all else, sleep apnea is typically seen as a problem with the brain wave connectivity with the body’s ability to subconsciously work with the autonomic system to allow breathing while sleeping. This means that the brain isn’t giving the correct signals to the body while sleeping with sleep apnea patients. So, they may go long periods without breathing. This can cause brain damage and even death later on, untreated.
In today’s world, it’s wonderful that science and medicine can provide us with the means to heal ourselves for many conditions. Of these developments, we can see what sleep trackers can tell us about sleep apnea, how it affects us, and what we can do to improve the condition that we have developed over time.
