Airway Health Connection to Overall Health

The three pillars of health are nutrition, physical exercise and sleep. While we can be attentive to what we eat or how much we exercise each day, many of us do not pay as close attention to our sleep hygiene. Yet, it is vital that we give our bodies the best quality of sleep we can. Sleep is the foundation of our overall well being. It is not necessarily measured in the quantity of sleep we get nightly, but the quality of our sleep.

Quality or restorative sleep is when you sleep well and feel rested in the morning, even if you don’t sleep as many hours as others. It’s the type of sleep that allows your body and mind to repair and replenish themselves after being active all day. Restorative sleep is critical for brain and emotional health, immune system function, hormonal balance, tissue repair and growth and energy restoration. Deep sleep and REM (dream) sleep are essential components of restorative sleep. Sleep apnea, whether mild or severe, disrupts our body’s ability to enter or remain in these important sleep stages, thereby, negatively impacting the restorative sleep we need. 

Obstructive sleep apnea is a potentially serious sleep disorder is a collapse of the soft structures in a person’s airway resulting in sleep breathing which repeatedly stops and starts. This fragmented sleep pattern causes a disruption of the body’s natural hormone balance throughout the night affecting multiple organ systems such as the brain, heart, lungs liver and digestive system.