What exactly is Sleep Apnea?

What exactly is Sleep Apnea?

The Greek word apnea means “without breath.” Sleep Apnea occurs when your windpipe becomes completely blocked during sleep and you stop breathing.

Completely.

During an apnea, your breathing may halt for as little as 10 seconds—or for as long as several minutes. As you can imagine, your brain and yourbody do not react well when your oxygen is completely cut off.

Instantaneously, the oxygen saturation levels plummet. Your carbon dioxide levels soar. Your face may turn blue. Your brain waves go into overdrive. Your loud snoring completely stops and you become eerily silent. Your heart rate skyrockets to as much as 300 beats per minute. These are just a few of the hundreds of your physiological reactions to an apnea episode. All of them bad.

With every second, your condition deteriorates, until finally, your brain wakes up and sends an emergency signal to your body ordering it to clear the blockage NOW! This triggers a violent, gasp-like expulsion of air that reopens your blocked windpipe. And just like that, the episode is over.

What’s amazing is that while all of this is happening, you don’t wake up. Your sleep will be severely interrupted and disturbed but you won’t realize it. This is why the vast majority of people
suffering from Sleep Apnea have no idea they are experiencing these horrible episodes every night.

After the episode your breathing—and snoring—resume immediately as if nothing has happened. And they both continue—until the next episode. Some people experience hundreds even thousands of these episodes a night.

And they never know it.

This is what makes Sleep Apnea such a deadly medical condition. Most people who have it never know it.

Until it is too late.