If you're drinking coffee for alertness, you are probably causing your own problems. Try quitting for a week, getting enough sleep for once, and consider if you're ADHD.
("Mental noise" is one of the symptoms of ADHD too.)
("Mental noise" is one of the symptoms of ADHD too.)
But caffeine makes it hard to sleep and the adrenaline rush isn't so good for you.
My advice to people is to quit one at a time. Take a few days (or even a week) to taper each one down to 0 separately.
Surgery is intense and also costs 100k (it is out of network for every major PPO insurance). The most likely to be successful procedure entails painfully breaking your jaw and moving it forward with metal plates. The recovery is brutal and requires a month long Soylent diet. Other procedures involve iteratively carving out more and more soft tissue in your tonsils until there is no more obstruction.
Sleep apnea treatment is still a pretty unsolved problem in medicine. Only half of patients end up complying with wearing the very uncomfortable CPAP breathing mask for more than four hours a night, most can't even tolerate it at all.
Also there is a dental appliance that pushes the lower jaw forward to open the airways. Look into that. If your insurance doesnt cover it you can buy an off-label "anti-snore" boil-and-bite device that does the same thing.
No. I weigh 150 lbs (6 feet tall), same since high school.
> Do you eat a simple diet that takes account of possible allergies?
No allergies, and I'm doing better now with diet.
> Do you get a lot of exercise?
I run 2-3 days a week (2-3 miles per run). Used to be a state competitor in high school for distance running.
> Do you work at a desk job in a hunched position that has curved your spine and pushed vertebrae into your throat?
Absolutely. I sit at my desk 10+ hours a day, and my posture definitely could be a hell of a lot better.
Remember, obstructive sleep apnea is caused by a physical _obstruction_. You need to either address the obstruction by splinting it open using pressurized air (CPAP) or by physically making more room via surgical techniques.
Ingesting herbs doesn't address anything in terms of there being an obstruction, so it doesn't treat sleep apnea.
EDIT: Why am I getting downvoted? I am suffering from a debilitating medical disorder, and people are suggesting I need to drink snake oil or accept the flying spaghetti monster in order to heal myself. Of course, I am going to get a little upset. Please try to understand my perspective.
Like most technologists who frequent this site, I'm all for following the scientific method and gathering data through repeatable experiments that test hypotheses, and I'm against petty tradition ("we've always done it this way" is a very counterproductive/backwards way of thinking that also precludes progress -- as an entrepreneurial community, we tend to think differently and to challenge established beliefs here on HN).
I'd be very interested in reading them.
Nevertheless, I will still provide you with some samples of evidence (these are high level summaries but actual studies are linked within:
Meditation:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_on_meditation
Yoga:
https://nccih.nih.gov/health/yoga/introduction.htm#hed5
Acupuncture:
I just don't see how any of these can _possibly_ resolve _obstructive_ sleep apnea. For example, if you have a large tongue and it collapses in your sleep, I don't see how you can solve that by meditating. That's physically impossible.
It's very easy to see whether something has any sort of effect on your apnea; you sleep every night, and the difference is readily noticeable.
So the point is to perhaps be a bit more open minded and look into someone's suggestion rather than writing them off with a snide comment. There may or may not be something more to what they are saying, but you will never know if you think you somehow have the upper hand on truth over everyone else that ever existed.