You Can Treat Snoring. So Why Don't You?

You're unconscious, vulnerable, and making a noise that could wake the neighbors. And there's a good chance you have no idea.

At least 25% of adults snore regularly. For roughly half of them, that snoring is a symptom of obstructive sleep apnea—a condition where the airway repeatedly collapses during sleep, starving the body of oxygen and fragmenting rest into dozens or hundreds of micro-awakenings per night. Left untreated, moderate-to-severe cases raise the risk of high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, and heart attack. According to the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort Study, the most comprehensive dataset available, one in four Americans between 30 and 70 has at least mild apnea. One in ten has a moderate-to-severe case. Most of them don't know it.

That's the strange thing about sleep disorders. The damage happens precisely when you're not watching.

Why Humans Snore (And Why It's Getting Worse)

Snoring is, in a technical sense, an evolutionary accident. Eric Kezirian, an otolaryngologist and sleep-medicine specialist at UCLA, explains it this way: when humans began walking upright, the airway developed a right-angle bend. When language evolved, the neck lengthened to accommodate the anatomy of speech. The result is an airway that takes a sharp turn through a longer-than-ideal passage—"not helpful from a breathing perspective," as Kezirian puts it.

Modern life amplifies the problem. Muscles lose tone with age. A more calorie-rich diet adds fat tissue around the throat, compressing the airway. Kevin Boyd, a pediatric dentist in Chicago who specializes in breathing, points to an even earlier culprit: the shift away from prolonged breastfeeding and toward soft baby food has led to smaller jaw development in children, leaving less room for the tongue. The roots of your snoring may trace back to a jar of Gerber.

Snoring on its own isn't classified as a medical condition—its consequences are largely what doctors call "social," and what the rest of us call "being elbowed awake at 2 a.m." But when the blockage is severe enough to cut off airflow, you have obstructive sleep apnea. The condition wasn't formally diagnosed until the 1970s; before that, clinicians called it "Pickwickian syndrome," after an obese, perpetually drowsy character in a Charles Dickens novel. Today, estimates suggest it affects tens of millions of Americans alone, with a large and unknown share of cases going undetected.

The Treatment Landscape: Effective, Complicated, and Often Abandoned

The gold standard remains the CPAP machine, introduced in the 1980s. It works by pushing pressurized air through a mask and into the airway, mechanically preventing collapse. The results are unambiguous. Kevin Motz, an otolaryngologist at Johns Hopkins, puts it plainly: "It's very, very, very, very effective if it's worn and tolerated." The catch is in that last clause. Patient adherence rates sit somewhere between 30 and 60 percent. The machine is loud, cumbersome, and, as many patients describe it, a reliable intimacy-killer.

For those who won't wear a CPAP, the alternatives multiply quickly—and so does the confusion. Mandibular advancement devices reposition the jaw to open the airway. Positional therapy trains patients to sleep on their side. Weight loss helps, though it's rarely as simple as it sounds. Surgery is an option for structural issues. And then there's the stranger end of the spectrum.

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A 2006 study from Switzerland found that 25 minutes of daily didgeridoo playing produced significant reductions in sleep apnea severity. The instrument requires sustained circular breathing that exercises the upper airway muscles—the same muscles that collapse during sleep. It is, almost certainly, the most metal treatment option in respiratory medicine.

More practically, Brazilian researchers began developing orofacial myofunctional therapy in the 1990s: a structured set of tongue and throat exercises designed to build muscle tone in the upper airway. A 2009 randomized controlled trial showed meaningful reductions in snoring frequency, snoring volume, and apnea severity. Subsequent meta-analyses have reinforced the approach. But Kezirian pushes back: those meta-analyses are "completely outrageous," he argues, because they aggregate studies using entirely different exercise protocols. The evidence base is messier than it appears.

The App That Has You Licking Your Phone

Kezirian does, however, point to one specific intervention with credible evidence behind it: Airway Gym, an app developed by Carlos O'Connor Reina, a Spanish otolaryngologist. Reina's research identifies a "hypotonic phenotype"—patients whose apnea stems primarily from weak upper airway musculature—and his experiments show that targeted myofunctional therapy can produce measurable anatomical changes in the airway.

The app costs a few dollars and delivers nine exercises, four of which involve pressing your tongue against your phone screen in various directions. (The app recommends wrapping the screen in plastic wrap first, for reasons that should be obvious.) The remaining exercises use the jaw and cheeks. Each is performed in five-second bursts, 15 repetitions per set. Total daily commitment: about 15 minutes.

The journalist behind the original account of this treatment tried it after an at-home sleep study revealed 149 respiratory disturbances in a single night—qualifying as mild apnea. Within two weeks of daily Airway Gym training, his snoring had dropped by roughly half in both frequency and volume. He quit in January when life got busy. The snoring returned in full. He restarted. "If a viable treatment exists and I choose not to do it," he writes, "then my snoring could be said to be my fault."

That sentence is worth sitting with.

The Responsibility Shift

For most of human history, snoring was simply a fact of life—annoying, occasionally dangerous, but essentially uncontrollable. The sleeper couldn't be blamed for what happened while unconscious. What's changing now is not just the availability of treatments, but the visibility of the problem. Wearable devices and sleep-tracking apps can now tell you exactly how many times your breathing was disrupted last night, how loud your snoring was, and whether it's getting worse.

This creates a new kind of accountability. When ignorance was the default, inaction was understandable. When data is available and treatments exist—even imperfect, inconvenient ones—the calculus shifts. The snorer who knows and does nothing is in a different moral position than the snorer who simply never knew.

This isn't unique to sleep health. It mirrors broader tensions in personal wellness: the more we can measure, the more we're expected to act on what we measure. Continuous glucose monitors, genetic risk scores, wearable ECGs—each new data stream expands both our knowledge and our sense of obligation. Whether that's empowering or exhausting depends considerably on who you ask.

For the health tech industry, the opportunity is clear. The global sleep economy is already valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars. CPAP manufacturers, oral appliance makers, sleep clinics, and app developers are all competing for the same anxious, under-rested market. The challenge isn't awareness anymore—it's adherence. Getting people to start a treatment is hard enough. Getting them to stick with it is harder.