Learning To Play The Didgeridoo Could Help Stop Your Snoring

Snoring became a problem for Obediya Jones-Darrell, a 38-year-old artist and acupuncturist in Vancouver, Canada, in college. “I would spend long hours on campus studying in the library. I would fall asleep, and then wake up from hearing a loud noise,” he says. “I think other students in the library were waking me up on purpose because I was snoring.” Jones-Darrell soon noticed that the quality of his sleep was being affected — he didn’t feel rested in the morning and had stopped remembering his dreams — so he sought help from his family doctor and was diagnosed with sleep apnea, a common sleep disorder that can obstruct breathing during sleep and cause snoring. A CPAP machine ― a mask worn at night to help ensure continued breathing ― stopped the snoring, but Jones-Darrell still wasn’t remembering dreams. So he decided to look for a complementary alternative anti-snoring treatment. To his surprise, his research revealed that many people have reported improvements in snoring after learning to play the didgeridoo, a wooden wind instrument played by indigenous Australians. “To play this instrument,” Jones-Darrell explains, “you need to learn how to do circular breathing,” which is a technique used by wind instrument-playing musicians to keep a continuous tone and requires the player to breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth at the same time. “I would go to a park close to my house an...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news