What is sleep apnoea?

If you’ve tried improving your sleep, but still snore or wake up feeling tired, you may be at risk of a common sleep disorder called sleep apnoea.

What is sleep apnoea? "Apnoea" literally means "no breath" or "stopping breathing".When you have an apnoea, air stops flowing to your lungs for 10 seconds or longer—that is, you actually stop breathing. 

Sensing you have stopped breathing, a control centre in your brain triggers you to wake up just enough to gasp and start breathing again. Then you fall back to sleep and the cycle begins again—this can happen more than 50 times every hour, even though you may not remember waking up.

As you can imagine, being deprived of oxygen and constantly being triggered back into breathing—hour after hour, night after night—puts immense strain on your body.

Sleep apnoea affects more than 3 in 10 men and nearly 1 in 5 women, so it’s more common than you might think.*