How to Deal with a Snoring Partner: A Personal Experience

If you asked my partner if he snores, he would proclaim with full sincerity, “No! Never.” But if you asked me, I wouldn’t describe it as simply “snoring”—he’s sawing timber logs, making bolded ZZZs, catching horse flies. He snores with a bold, capitalized “S.” And after almost three years, me (and my horrible sleep score) couldn’t take it anymore.

“Snoring is caused by a change or reduction of the airflow in the nose or throat,” says Dr. Andrew Namen, a sleep medicine physician and spokesperson for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. “It can occur when your sinuses are swollen from allergies or congestion, your tongue falls back, or your jaws falls when you sleep.” He also—diplomatically—notes that snoring can create “a difficult environment for a bed partner,” as well as “wake you from your sleep or keep you from maintaining deep sleep, which has been associated with elevated blood pressure.”

While it’s estimated that up to 50% of Americans snore nightly, that didn’t make me feel any better—this was bad company to be in. Bad, tired, and grumpy company, to be exact.

First, I tried kicking. As in, kicking my partner every time the snoring started. I’ll admit, it was a short-term solution: He’d jolt awake and stop snoring for a moment or two, but once he settled back into a deep sleep, there he’d go again. Then I tried mouth tape at the recommendation of my coworker Arden Fanning Andrews—and as sexy as the practice of taping your lips shut in your sleep sounds, my partner gave it an instant no. If I was going to get the snoring to stop, I needed something convincing, something good. That’s when I found Eight Sleep.

Though it may be all about sleep, the Eight Sleep is actually everything but your mattress: A cover, a smart hub, and a base. When it arrived in a series of ginormous, impossible-to-lift boxes, my partner was out of town for work (of course!), and so I had to hire someone to help me drag the boxes into my apartment and set it all up. Like a scene from Frankenstein (or really, Young Frankenstein) we strapped in my mattress, plugged in the wires, and clothed my Casper in its new sensor-filled black ensemble. When it was all over, my chest heaved. Aliveeee! I thought it connected to the WiFi—but it was 11:30 p.m. (well past my bedtime), so it was farewell to my professional box-shifter and right to sleep. No changes in sleep noticed.