There are a lot of anti-snoring products out there, throat sprays, special pillows, headset, and opening your nostrils, they may seem like convenient solutions for snoring, but they don’t work.

There isn’t one product that will cure snoring for everybody. In some cases, the position you sleep in may dramatically impact your ability to breathe and exacerbate snoring and sleep apnea.

What is ‘AHI’ on a Sleep Test?

The AHI is an acronym for “apnea-hypopnea index.” It records the number of apnea and hypopnea episodes per hour of sleep supervision in order to analyses them and determine the degree of sleep apnea severity the patient suffers from.

Sometimes when we are woken up we feel refreshed and sometimes we feel as if we did not have any sleep at all. 

Human sleep is a cycle which consists of waking stage, Non-REM Sleep and REM (Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep. In the waking stage, your body will prepare you to sleep. Your body will start to slow down, your muscles start to relax and your eye movements will slow down. After the waking stage, you will come to Non-REM Sleep which comprises of 4 stages and lasts from 90 – 120 minutes. In stage 1, the sleep is called drowsiness. The eyes are closed once you are in this stage. But if you are aroused from it, you might feel as if you have not slept. Stage 2 is the light sleep period. In this stage, the polysomnographic readings will show intermittent peaks and valleys, or positive and negative waves. These waves indicate spontaneous periods of muscle tone mixed with periods of muscle relaxation.

Heart Rate Variability, or HRV, is a new way to track your health. 

Heart rate variability is literally the variance in time between the beats of your heart. So, if your heart rate is 60 beats per minute, it’s not actually beating once every second. Within that minute there maybe 0.9 seconds between two beats, for example, and 1.15 seconds between two others. The greater this variability is, the more “ready” your body is to execute at a high level.

HRV is simply a measure of the variation in time between each heartbeat. This variation is controlled by a primitive part of the nervous system called the autonomic nervous system (ANS). It works regardless of our desire and regulates, among other things, our heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, and digestion. The ANS is subdivided into two large components, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system, also known as the fight-or-flight mechanism and the relaxation response.

Blood oxygen levels during sleep should be at a 95 percent saturation, which is considered normal, according to the American Sleep Apnea Association (AASM). 

It is normal for blood oxygen levels to decrease during sleep. All body systems have altered basal function during your sleep, including breathing. You don’t breathe as deeply when you are sleeping, and not all your lung spaces function at full capacity. Because of this effect of sleep on breathing, it is normal for your sleep oxygen level to decrease below awake levels. Tests that show a waking oxygen level at or above 94 percent typically indicate a sleep oxygen level of at or above 88 percent.

Your resting heart rate, or RHR, is how many times your heart beats in one minute while you are at rest. It’s both a gauge of your heart health and a biomarker of aging, it’s one of the simplest and best measures of your health.

A healthy resting heart rate is about 60 beats per minute, but this number varies with age. The normal range for a resting heart rate is between 60 bpm and 100 bpm. Well-conditioned athletes, however, could have a resting heart rate of around 40 bpm. Generally, a lower heart rate at rest implies more efficient heart function and better cardiovascular fitness.