mxx1's avatar

Recorder

Yup, so the mystery is – why does my snoring come and go?

Last night, I was awake “all” night in a second order nightmare. My snoring woke the grumpy elf which woke me, etc.

However I had just enough transitional semi-awake moments to capture the snoring pig in action. I did a Fourier Transfer analysis in my head (square root of the number of samples) and Eureka…

Resonance is the key. You need a certain velocity of air sucked by the reverse bagpipes known as our lungs, in order to get the dangling throaty bits to resonate.

That critical velocity reduces as you age due to sagging of your dangling bits and the other bits around it. Tonsils and uvula, if you will.

Effectively you’re a primary school recorder that can think just a little. And you’re about as tuneful.

So here’s my mystery solved; at night I only breathe through my nose. If it’s partially blocked then I breathe harder to get enough air, thus higher air velocity leading to critical velocity and resonance. Hence the intermittent snoring – if my nose is clear, no snoring.

If it’s totally blocked, say I’ve got a cold, then I breathe through my mouth. No snoring then either. But I end up with dry mouth, which I hate. It’s probably why I’ve trained myself to nose breathe at night.

I’m sure there’s people that can snore through their mouth because their dangling bits are really loose, so they have a very low critical velocity (the apertures in the mouth are larger, so the same lung vacuum results in a lower air velocity). But that’s not me.

So a mouth guard didn’t work for me because it didn’t force me to open my mouth. Same for the gimp mask thing; it actually kept my mouth even more closed.

The evil CPAP machine is a piece of overpriced rubbish. It works by doing the breathing for you so you never get the high velocities required for snoring.

Interestingly, when I used the nose mask on the CPAP machine I didn’t snore because it forced me to breath out through my mouth (I couldn’t exhale through my nose against the positive pressure – frightening as hell). Mouth open, that was clue.

So what’s the solution now I have a working hypothesis?

Step 1, test hypothesis; one night when I’m snoring I’ll use Otrivine to clear my nose at a known time, and then see what it does to my snoring, which I can record with the snoring app.

Then I either need to find something that keeps my mouth partly open or, more likely, train myself to do that automatically. If it’s open, the lung will automatically suck air through that channel as well, lowering the air velocity overall.

I’m going to suffer from dry mouth but I’ll just have to suck that up. Literally.

Getting the laser treatment makes sense because it tightens the dangling bits, increasing the air velocity required to initiate snoring. Getting the tonsils removed also makes sense.

I can’t do the CPAP shit. It’s an abomination foistered on hundreds of millions of people who must be bloody miserable human beings. I’d rather just have an operation on my throat.

And just think, frogs do this shit on purpose. This is me, being that frog with his hands around the stork’s literal neck. I don’t know why I have to do all the thinking for the rest of the lazy cunts.