Snoring is one of those things that seems to affect other people more than yourself, especially those who share your bedroom. In a way, it’s a social disease, since it can cause insomnia in those around you. This makes the snorer as welcome in bed as someone who ate beans for dinner.
Why do people snore? Is there possibly a benefit to snoring for the snorer?
I believe there is. And I’m not just saying that because I snore.
It has to do with the thyroid gland.
There is a very important relationship between the thyroid gland and the throat, where it is located. Specifically, the butterfly-shaped thyroid gland is intimately wrapped around the larynx, or voice box. If you feel for your Adam’s apple, which is the largest cartilage protrusion in your neck, and you speak, yell, or sing, you will feel your throat vibrating. The thyroid gland sits just beneath and around the Adam’s apple, so it vibrates, too.
The thyroid gland is filled with a gel-like substance that stores the thyroid hormone thyroxine. This is a critical hormone that is responsible for the basic metabolic rate of your entire body and all its systems. It is important to note its location. It is not protected inside the abdomen or chest cavity or skull, which you would expect for a sensitive and important gland. Instead, it is located on the outside of the voice box, where it is able to be physically touched and is constantly vibrated whenever we speak.
Currently, modern medicine ignores the biophysical impact of vibration on the thyroid. According to modern dogma, the thyroid gland is only stimulated by thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) from the pituitary gland, located in the brain. The pituitary is stimulated to release TSH by a releasing factor coming from the nearby hypothalamus, which detects the level of circulating thyroxine in the blood.
According to this biochemical model, if the thyroxine level is too low, then the hypothalamus tells the pituitary to release more TSH, which then goes into the bloodstream to the thyroid gland in the throat and makes the thyroid release more thyroxine from its stores within the gland. The thyroxine travels through the bloodstream back to the brain and hypothalamus, which then modifies the TSH secretion from the pituitary, thereby calming down the thyroid gland, in a classic feedback loop. In fact, this was one of the first hormone feedback loops discovered, a great feat of early biochemistry.
However, when you consider biomechanics, you need to add factors such as vibration into the equation of how the thyroid gland gets stimulated. Given the proximity of the thyroid gland to the highly-vibrating voice box, it stands to reason that vibration of the gel-like thyroid gland results in release of thyroxine.
I originally published this theory in an article in 2015, called,Your Voice and Your Health: Thyroid Stimulation Through Vocal Vibration. In 2016, a study was published in Biochemistry and Biophysics Reports, entitled, Vibratory stimulation enhances thyroid epithelial cell function. According to the authors,
“The vocal cords, which are in close proximity to the thyroid, may also supply the thyroid with important mechanical signals that modulate hormone production via mechanical vibrations from phonation…cells responded to mechanical stimulation with significantly (p<0.05) increased metabolic activity, significantly (p<0.05) increased ROS production, and increased gene expression of thyroglobulin and sodium-iodide symporter compared to un-stimulated controls, and showed an equivalent or greater response than TSH only stimulated cells. Furthermore, the combination of TSH and oscillatory motion produced a greater response than mechanical or chemical stimulation alone. Taken together, these results suggest that mechanical vibrations could provide stimulatory cues that help maintain thyroid function.”
My theory is that we all develop a balance in our thyroid control between the use of our voice and our level of TSH. If you are a person who speaks or yells a lot, or sings, or in general uses their voice more than others, then you probably have relatively low TSH levels, since vibrations are doing much of the work of stimulating your thyroid. But if you are a quiet person who rarely uses your voice, then you will probably have relatively high TSH to pick up the slack.
As we go through life, balancing our thyroid function between the biochemical influence of TSH and the biophysical influence of vocal vibration, we sometimes experience episodes when we yell more than usual, or speak less than usual.
Perhaps there is a stressful event in someone’s life, like marital problems, resulting in lots of screaming. This would result in a reduction of TSH production, to prevent overstimulating the thyroid. However, if the screaming over-vibrates the thyroid, releasing too much hormone and damaging the gland (which also happens in some loud occupational settings with lots of vibration), then there could be transient hyperthyroidism symptoms. This could theoretically resolve by itself by letting the thyroid heal from vibration by keeping quiet.
Alternatively, perhaps someone who is a regular choir member and likes to use their voice suddenly experiences a negative life event that causes them to stop singing and talking as much. This reduction in normal (for that person) vocal stimulation would result in higher TSH levels, to compensate. However, they could experience a transient hypothyroidism, until their biochemistry kicks in.
This means that people who have life events which alter their vocalization may experience thyroid issues. It also suggests that returning to the normal use of their voice can help return the balance to their thyroid management.
People who have overstimulated their thyroids with over-vocalization need to take a break from using their voice. Consider this “quiet therapy”. Those who stopped using their voices as much as usual need to speak, sing, hum, and vibrate their thyroids.
Of course, this begs the question of whether there are other ways to vibrate the thyroid besides using your voice. And the obvious answer came to me in the middle of the night — Snoring!
According to acoustic studies, snoring is physically caused by the vibration of the soft palate, tongue, and uvula (the drip at the back of your throat) waving in the wind as you breathe. While the voice box does not cause the vibration of snoring, it does experience the vibrations from snoring, as does the thyroid.
Try this experiment. Place your hand around your Adam’s apple and hum. Now try to yell. Now try to snore. You will discover that each vibrates your hand. It also vibrates your thyroid.
This means that snoring may be a defense mechanism for people with low thyroid. For people who are not actively stimulating their voices enough, snoring is another way to passively vibrate the thyroid.
When you are low in thyroid hormone, or hypothyroid, you experience changes in the body’s tissues, which thicken. This condition, called myxedema, makes the tissues in the throat thicker, as well, and results in snoring. Low thyroid also weakens muscles, including in the throat, leading to flabbier throat structures which vibrate more easily, again resulting in snoring, or making it louder. Low thyroid also makes people gain weight, which thickens the throat and increases the incidence of obstructive sleep apnea, which causes snoring, too.
It makes sense that an organ as vital as the thyroid gland would have multiple control mechanisms and redundancies. If one system fails, there are back-up methods of thyroid stimulation. Of course, this also means you can overstimulate the thyroid if you talk or snore too much. Balance is the key.
But it also means that you should not immediately run to the doctor if you think you have thyroid symptoms. The medical approach to the thyroid is to typically destroy the thyroid gland with radioactive iodine and substitute it with lifetime thyroid medication. This is irreversible, which is unfortunate in situations where the thyroid problem was temporary and due to changes in vibrational stimulation.
Of course, since modern medicine is currently ignoring the impact of vibration on thyroid function, don’t expect much research into this area. And since we are a snore-phobic culture, don’t expect much sympathy for snorers, who may be simply trying to stimulate their weak thyroids.
Here are some things to consider about snoring:
- If you are snoring due to your thyroid needing stimulation, then try to stimulate it with singing and talking. If all you need is more vibratory stimulation, you can do that deliberately and actively, instead of having your body do it passively with snoring.
- There have been studies showing that singing can help treat obstructive sleep apnea by strengthening the throat structures. See Singing for Snorers. This should also work for the thyroid.
- Try raising the head of your bed about 10-30 degrees. This is known to help with obstructive sleep apnea, which is related to head position and gravity pulling the tongue down the throat. Elevating the head of the bed better positions the tongue relative to the throat. This position also optimizes brain circulation. See my article, Important! How the Way You Sleep can cause Migraines, Alzheimer’s, Stroke, Sleep Apnea, Glaucoma, ADHD, and More!
- Side sleeping is also known to reduce snoring, but it causes compression of the hips, shoulders, and other structures, and misaligns the spine. Back sleeping is ideal, but needs to be with head-of-bed elevation. If you think you can’t sleep on your back, that’s because you tried it sleeping too flat. Try back-sleeping while elevated.
- Obesity is also a factor in snoring, and can also be a product of low thyroid. This again shows the adaptive function of snoring. Low thyroid can result in weight gain, which results in thickening of the throat structures, which results in snoring, which can hopefully stimulate the thyroid to increase thyroid release, which increases metabolism and reduces obesity, which would reduce snoring.
- If you sleep with someone and must endure their snore, please be kind and refrain from jabbing them in the ribs to silence their ghastly sound. Gently tugging on the covers may disrupt them enough to make them stop snoring for a while, hopefully long enough for you to fall back asleep.
- If you suffer from someone else’s snore, consider not sleeping in the same room. Sleeping together loses its appeal when someone is sawing wood right next to your ear.
- Be aware of vibrations in your surroundings affecting your thyroid. Occupational damage to the thyroid is known to happen in very loud work environments.
- Remember that people often don’t realize when they snore. You, too, could be a snorer. Don’t throw stones.
- Snoring is not confined to humans. If Fido snores, he probably needs the thyroid stimulation, too, since their thyroids are on their throat, as well.
Of course, snoring is not the most socially acceptable way to improve your thyroid. But nature has provided our bodies with many ways to protect this vital organ. Keep that in mind the next time your sleep partner flaps their uvula in your ear. It’s nature at work. Just grab a blanket and sleep on the couch.