If you wake up in the morning and you find your significant other sleeping in the next room, you probably have sleep apnea. Or, if like me, you think that your superpower is to be able to fall asleep instantly, you also likely have sleep apnea. That’s what is known as ‘sleep pressure’ and is a sign you are poorly rested.

Sleep apnea is estimated to affect 2-4% of the adult population, however many people are undiagnosed so the true numbers are likely much greater. It’s a very serious condition, and unfortunately many people ignore it.

Perhaps it’s the annoyance of wearing a CPAP, or just not wanting to face your issues. Or perhaps most do not fully understand how devastating it can be for your health. It must be addressed because these are just some of the things sleep apnea can do you left untreated:

Weight gain
Diabetes
Stress
Alzheimer’s
Chronic fatigue
Metabolic dysfunction
Heart attack
Stroke
Oxygen depletion

Fun list, right? There is one common thread amongst all of those complications; insulin resistance. If you feel like insulin resistance, aka diabetes, seems to cause every known chronic condition, well you’re right. Every cell in your body has insulin receptors. Insulin is a very potent hormone that instructs the cell to behave in certain ways. The way the body works is that hormones have certain roles. Once your body stops responding to the signal of the hormone, it has the opposite effect. For example, one role of insulin is vasodilation. So when your body stops responding to it, your blood vessels constrict. That’s just one way it affects the cardiovascular system.

So what is the relationship between insulin resistance and sleep apnea? Breathing is directly tied to your nervous system. Breathing through your nose is parasympathetic, breathing through your mouth is sympathetic. When you snore, your mouth is open. So you’re in a sympathetic state all night. The sympathetic nervous system causes cortisol to be released. This is a hormone that instructs the liver and muscle to release glucose into the bloodstream for quick energy because the body thinks it’s in a flight or fight mode.

Over years of sleeping this way you maintain chronic elevated blood sugars. The pancreas tries to balance the elevated blood sugar by secreting insulin which does the opposite of cortisol. The cells stop responding to insulin. Now you are developing metabolic problems and becoming diabetic. Next comes weight gain and fatty liver. Later in life it turns into Alzheimer’s which has become known as type 3 diabetes. This is when blood sugar starts to affect the brain.

The body has 4 main homeostatic regulators, pH, O2/CO2, temperature, and blood sugar. All of these are tightly regulated and if they go off a bit, things go wrong. The good news is that blood sugar can relatively easily be influenced by diet and lifestyle choices. However, you can do all the right things with diet, exercise, cold exposure, etc; if you have sleep apnea, you’ll be fighting against the current.

Get it checked out. There are now home sleep studies that can be ordered by a pulmonologist. Find out how severe you are and get it addressed. Your best bet is a CPAP. However, if you have mild sleep apnea, or until you get a CPAP, there are devices that may help.

We’ve had good results using a combination of this mouthpiece, and this mouth tape. The mouthpiece pushes your tongue forward, and the mouth tape forces you to breathe through your nose.

Here is a quick quiz you can take which is a sensitive screening tool for sleep apnea.

What Happens if You Ignore Sleep Apnea?