You Don’t Have to Snore

For the past few months, in pursuit of better sleep, I have been setting aside 15 minutes a day to lick my phone. This is as undignified as it sounds. But then, nothing about snoring, or the bewildering range of real and sham treatments for it, is particularly dignified. With our slackened tongues and uncontrollable snorts, snorers are at our most annoying right when we’re at our most passive and vulnerable. Our spouses toss and turn while we drone on, until a strategically placed elbow—or our own snuffling—jolts us awake.  

Breathing while sleeping should not be complicated. “I could do that in my sleep,” we say, of something easy. What’s easier than breathing? And yet, for many of us, the simple task of staying alive through the night is not straightforward. At least 25 percent of adults snore regularly. The problem is more prevalent among men, which means that the closely related problem of wanting to murder one’s bed partner is more prevalent among women.

Regular snoring becomes more likely as you age. For me, the condition seems to have emerged about five years ago, in my early 30s, although it’s hard to pinpoint the precise beginning because I was asleep for it. Last summer, I finally did the responsible thing and took an at-home sleep study. My snoring turned out to be a symptom of obstructive sleep apnea, a condition that causes many snorers to wake up throughout the night to restart our breathing.

My dentist presented three treatment options. (Many dentists dabble in sleep medicine, a function of the anatomy involved.) I could try a continuous-positive-airway-pressure machine, better known as a CPAP, an effective but awkward gas-mask-like contraption. Or I could get a mandibular-advancement device: a kind of specialized retainer that forces your lower jaw forward, creating more space for air to flow.

Most intriguing was option three: orofacial myofunctional therapy. By performing certain mouth and throat exercises, my dentist explained, I could train myself not to snore. “Are you saying I can do physical therapy to cure snoring?” I asked. “Basically, yeah,” she said.

The idea that snoring could be alleviated with exercise was news to me. But then, I had never given snoring much thought. Once I began to look into it, I learned that snoring is an immensely complicated phenomenon—one with a baffling range of potential treatments. If you snore, there’s a good chance a cure is out there for you. Good luck finding it.

Scientifically speaking, snoring is just a vibration. When you breathe, your chest cavity expands, which lowers the pressure inside your lungs. Air then rushes into your nose (or, less optimally, your mouth); past your throat, voice box, and windpipe; and into your lungs. Then the chest contracts and the process repeats in reverse. When everything is functioning properly, this is a quiet process.

Snoring is the sound of everything not functioning properly. Between the nose and the larynx, something is getting in the way. The obstacle could be a deviated septum. It could be overly large tonsils or adenoids. Most likely, it’s the collapse of muscle somewhere in the upper airway. When you’re awake, your tongue and throat know how to stay clear of your breath. When you sleep, they relax. Your tongue might fall back into your throat, or the throat itself might relax too much, narrowing the aperture for air to get in and causing any number of the surrounding structures to vibrate.

Snoring serves no evolutionary purpose. It does not help attract mates, to say the least, and noisily broadcasting your location to potential predators while you’re unconscious is a big Darwinian no-no. Eric Kezirian, an otolaryngologist and sleep-medicine doctor at UCLA, told me that snoring is probably a by-product of several other adaptations that were useful. Walking on two feet freed our hands, but introduced a bend into our airway. The development of language required more neck space to house the anatomy associated with speech. This combination—air taking a right angle to go down the throat, plus having to pass through a longer neck—“is not helpful from a breathing perspective,” Kezirian said.

[From the August 2025 issue: Why can’t Americans sleep? ]

Modern life has created the conditions for a snoring epidemic. We live longer than our hunter-gatherer ancestors did, and our muscles lose tone as we age. We inhabit a more calorie-rich environment, giving us more fat tissue in the throat to press upon the windpipe. Some experts believe that modern child-rearing practices are also to blame. Premodern children grew up chewing tough food, which contributed to jaw development. The shift away from prolonged breast-feeding and toward mushy baby food has led to smaller jaws with less room for the tongue. Kevin Boyd, a pediatric dentist in Chicago who specializes in breathing issues, told me to ask my mom whether I was weaned onto Gerber early. Turns out, I was. So, on top of everything else, snoring might give our spouses another reason to resent their mothers-in-law.

Snoring on its own is not generally viewed as a medical condition requiring treatment. It mainly brings about what doctors call “social consequences,” and what I call “getting woken up by my wife, then being too mad to fall back asleep.” If the blockage keeps some air from getting to your lungs, however, you have obstructive sleep apnea—literally “breathlessness,” from the Greek apnous. This affects as many as half of snorers. If untreated, moderate and severe cases can lead to high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, or heart attack. Even if the sleeper is getting enough oxygen, apnea might cause them to wake up throughout the night, depriving them of adequate sleep. This is why daytime drowsiness is one of the main symptoms.

In his 2017 book, The Mystery of Sleep, the eminent sleep doctor Meir Kryger writes that apnea “has been around as long as there have been obese people.” But the condition was not formalized as a clinical diagnosis until the 1970s. (Before that, scientists called it “Pickwickian syndrome,” after an overweight Charles Dickens character who can’t stay awake.) Estimates of its prevalence are all over the place. Different sources use different thresholds to define the disorder, and an unknown but certainly high share of cases go undiagnosed. An analysis of the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort Study, which provides the most comprehensive data available, found that one in four Americans ages 30 to 70 had at least mild apnea, and one in 10 had a moderate-to-severe case.  

According to my home sleep test, I scored a 10 on the “apnea-hypopnea index,” qualifying my case as a mild one. My oxygen levels were fine, but I had 149 respiratory disturbances, or mini wake-ups, over the course of the night. That sounded bad. My dentist asked if I wake up feeling tired or refreshed. I didn’t know refreshed was an option! Maybe if I treated the underlying condition, I would sleep soundly for eight hours and then spring out of bed. The bags under my eyes would disappear. Everything would be different. I just needed to figure out which treatment to pursue. How hard could that be?

The basic problem with treating sleep apnea is that different treatments work differently for different people, and finding the right solution is tedious. (Losing weight is a great place to start, but if I could manage to drop the 10 pounds I’ve put on in my 30s, I would have done it already.) To eliminate disruptions to your sleep, you have to be willing to try a bunch of things that will probably disrupt your sleep in other ways at first, and stick with them long enough to measure the results.

The gold standard for treating sleep apnea is the CPAP machine, which was introduced in the 1980s. The beauty of the CPAP is that it doesn’t care why your breathing is impaired. Whether the problem is the shape of your nose, the collapse of your throat muscles, or something else, it will use pressure to forcibly jam air into your lungs. The big drawback is the fact that the machine is obtrusive, awkward, and decidedly unsexy. According to research, the “patient adherence” rate is between 30 and 60 percent. “It’s very, very, very, very effective if it’s worn and tolerated,” Kevin Motz, an otolaryngologist and sleep-medicine doctor at Johns Hopkins, told me. “But it leaves something to be desired as far as the practicality of it.”

When Ray Fowler, a pastor in South Florida, discovered a few years ago that his lifelong snoring was a symptom of serious apnea, he knew he didn’t want to use a CPAP. So he tried almost every alternative remedy he came across online, a journey he documents in a recently self-published book, CPAP No More. The book’s takeaway can be summarized as follows: Snoring and sleep apnea can be cured without a CPAP, provided you are willing to test a wide array of solutions for at least a week at a time, record your breathing every night, and carefully study the results every morning over the course of a year.

Fowler tried all sorts of techniques and contraptions—mouth tape, oral appliances, a special therapeutic water bottle, tough Turkish chewing gum. Eventually he realized that his biggest enemy was gravity, which was pulling his tongue back into his airway. His solution was what practitioners would call “positional therapy.” Fowler, a habitual back-sleeper, learned to sleep on his side with the assistance of an air-filled backpack marketed as the Slumber Bump. A combination of a wedge and orthopedic pillow kept his head elevated. He also found benefits from daily breathing exercises.

“It’s actually pretty basic and simple, but it took a long time to figure out what was doing what,” Fowler told me. Once his apnea was cured, “all of a sudden I started dreaming again.”

I was not particularly keen on a year’s worth of trial and error. But, like Fowler, I didn’t want to wear a CPAP. And even with insurance, a custom-made mandibular-advancement device would cost several hundred dollars, which was a lot to pay for something that might not work.

Physical therapy was more appealing. In the ’90s, Brazilian researchers began integrating orofacial exercises into sleep medicine. The basic idea is that many apnea and snoring cases are caused by the tongue and throat muscles losing tone while sleeping. Exercises that increase those muscles’ strength and endurance might therefore help keep the throat open and unrestricted during sleep.

In a randomized controlled trial published in 2009, the Brazilians reported that a set of mouth-and-throat exercises led to significant decreases in snoring volume and frequency, sleep quality, and apnea severity. This was probably the most important study establishing the legitimacy of this emerging field, but it is not my favorite. My favorite is the 2006 paper in which scientists in Switzerland reported significant results from 25 minutes of daily didgeridoo playing. More recent meta-analyses have bolstered the case for treating apnea with airway workouts.

Even so, some medical experts think that myofunctional therapy can border on snake oil. “There is no scientific evidence that myofunctional-therapy practices in the United States have any proven benefits for adults with obstructive sleep apnea,” Kezirian, from UCLA, told me. All those meta-analyses purporting to show that the treatment works, he said, are “completely outrageous” because they lump together studies involving different sets of exercises.

Kezirian wasn’t totally against myofunctional therapy, however. The Brazilian randomized controlled study, he said, was legit. So was the didgeridoo study. And, he said, “there’s a cool app out there that has much more evidence” behind it. “It’s a specific set of exercises, not this grab bag.”

This was a tremendous relief to hear, because by the time I spoke with Kezirian, the app in question was looking like my best bet. It was designed by Carlos O’Connor Reina, a Spanish otolaryngologist. Reina’s research suggests that one of the most common causes of sleep apnea is a lack of muscle tone in the upper airway, which he refers to as “the hypotonic phenotype.” In experiments, he has found that myofunctional therapy can cause measurable changes in the anatomy of the upper airway. He and colleagues created the Airway Gym app as a cheap way to get the treatment to the masses.

That is how, just after Thanksgiving, I came to spend my free time licking my phone. This experience feels just as ridiculous as it sounds—actually, more so. The app includes nine exercises, four of which involve pressing your tongue in different movements against your phone screen. (The app recommends protecting the screen with plastic wrap, for hygienic reasons.) The others require pressing the phone with your jaw or cheeks. Most are performed for five-second bursts, in sets of 15.

This seemed even less likely than didgeridoo practice to improve my snoring. And yet, to my great surprise, it did. Over Thanksgiving weekend alone, my wife had felt the need to wake me up multiple times for noise violations. After less than two weeks of training, hostilities ceased almost completely. According to the recordings logged on my tracker app, my snoring had dropped in frequency and volume by about half. I didn’t notice feeling more energetic, but at least I wasn’t torturing my wife as much.

[Arthur C. Brooks: An evening ritual to realize a happier life]

Unfortunately, my progress hit a plateau. And keeping up with the app day after day became a grind. You can’t do it in public—far too shameful—and you can’t multitask while doing it, because you’ve got to hold your phone up against your face the whole time. I already had a stack of health habits I was supposed to be attending to: weight lifting, cardio, physical therapy for my balky knees. Finding time for yet another regimen wasn’t easy. When my life got busier in January, I gave up.

Big mistake. A few weeks after bailing on Airway Gym, a loud noise woke me with a start. I looked around wildly, my heart racing. It was, of course, my own snoring. A few days later, I noticed that I was feeling exhausted even after a full eight hours of sleep. That night, I recorded my snoring. It was as bad as ever. The therapy had improved my sleep quality, just too gradually for me to notice. Only by going off the treatment did I discover its full benefits.

Now I’m back to daily training. I really have no choice. For years, I never felt guilty about snoring. I couldn’t be blamed for what happened while I was unconscious. But if a viable treatment existed and I chose not to do it, then my snoring could be said to be my fault. Tongue exercises are tedious, and I don’t look forward to doing them for the rest of my life, but they’re worth it to get better sleep. My wife, meanwhile, guards against the occasional loud snort with one of the oldest and most elegant anti-snoring technologies ever devised: earplugs.