How Your Snoring Affects Your Sex Life & Relationships

As we recognize Sexual Health Awareness month, we evaluate how snoring impacts just that - your sex life. Do you find yourself sleeping in a separate room, or on the couch due to you or your partner’s snoring? Has it affected your intimacy with your spouse or partner? Unfortunately, this is a common problem many couples face: 25% of couples sleep in separate rooms due to snoring. Sleeping apart often contributes to the disconnection that can plague marriages and relationships.

Spending time in bed together with your mate is key for couples, because it is devoid of day to day distractions: work, children and obligations. In addition to sex, couples cuddle, spoon, and chat, which is an important part of the bonding process that brings a couple together.

Usually, snoring affects your partner in a myriad of unpleasant ways, such as irritability and moodiness. People who sleep next to loud snorers report high levels of fatigue, stress, sleepiness, and a lower quality of life which can lead to an increased risk of depression due to poor sleep. The effect of snoring on partners is difficult to avoid, so both need to handle the problem sensitively.

Here are some tips on how to cope with a situation when one partner is a snorer, and another is sleep deprived because of it:

• Talk. Be expressive about your emotional and physical feelings.
• See a doctor. Go together and devise solutions.
• Compromise. For example, if you have a presentation at work the next day and you know your snoring partner may disturb you, sleep one night separately, but don’t make it a habit.
• Try solutions like earplugs or earbuds, to help drown out the snoring

Your partner’s snoring could be an indicator of a bigger problem, sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is a potentially serious sleep disorder in which breathing repeatedly stops and starts. Sleep apnea affects almost 30% of snorers. Ongoing research has shown a strong link between sleep apnea and erectile dysfunction. Men can suffer from reduced testosterone production as a result which may, in turn, lead to impotence.

• Your physician can diagnose potential sleep apnea with a variety of tests. It requires medical diagnosis and prompt attention. You can address yours or your partner’s snoring and solve it with our ZQuiet 2-Size Comfort System anti-snoring mouthpiece.