Why do we Snore?

It’s happened to all of us: sleeplessly tossing and turning while the person next door snorts and snarfs his way through the night. Why is it a perfectly normal, healthy person will make such an awful noise? Dr. Neil B. Kavey, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City, offers some clues.

The sound you hear when someone is snoring is caused by the vibration of relaxed, floppy tissues that line the upper airway.

Here’s how it works. When you sleep, muscle tone throughout your body decreases. All the muscles in your body relax.

Your upper airway is lined with muscles that keep the airway open. When those muscles relax during sleep, the diameter of the airway decreases and, in some people, this partially blocks the airflow, leading to turbulence.

Instead of air flowing smoothly down the airway into the lungs, it flows with gusts and bursts. As the air travels through the airway, it picks up speed and gets whipped around in all different directions.