Sleep Apnea

Feb 28, 2026 | Health Care, Health Tips

How’s your sleep been, friend? And my follow-up question is, how’s your energy throughout the day?

If you’re not feeling super confident in either of the above questions, keep reading….I’ve got some super exciting information in this week’s post! Honestly, if you or someone you know is struggling, this information is SUPER important, and no one told me that what I’d been struggling with for probably most of my life, was sleep apnea….and on top of all of the health conditions that I’d been struggling with, I spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on different healing modalities, trying to fix all of the problems that probably arose from this!

I’ve been going down this rabbit hole now, friend,  for the last year. And I’m going to share this with you….I’m actually kind of upset that NO ONE, not one practitioner over the last 20 years (actually there was ONE doctor I spoke to, anecdotally, but I’ll come back around to that later) told me that the primary contributing factor to sooooo many of my health issues was sleep apnea.

If you’re not familiar with what that is, here’s a quick re-cap (and I’m going to link to a couple resources if you want to dive more deeply into this than what I’m offering up here): The Mayo Clinic defines it as ‘a potentially serious condition that causes breathing to stop and start several times during sleep. People with the condition snore loudly and feel tired even after a full night of sleep.’

There are 2 types: one that results from your brain not sending the proper signals to ignite breathing or ‘Central Sleep Apnea’.

The second type comes from obstruction in your airway or ‘Obstructive Sleep Apnea’.

While I’m in no way an expert in either one, I’ve been doing my own research and trial-and-error over this past year, and I want to plant the seeds of information for you so that you can, at the very least:

  • Understand what’s happening
  • How it may be affecting your health and quality of life
  • What you do have control over, and
  • How you can start making changes, right now

For the last 10 years, I’ve been struggling with insomnia, fatigue (pretty much my whole adult life but waaaaay better now), and anxiety (also in the past but no longer).

I went through SO much trying to figure all of this out and how to heal. I’ve done everything from cutting out toxic relationships to taking every vitamin/mineral supplement and proprietary herb blend, healers of all sorts, meditations, different kinds of exercise, not exercising, foods (and cutting out foods and drinks), stopping travelling and socializing at times, etc. The list is as long as the last 10 years.

Prior to that time, I suffered from intense fatigue from around age 14 to my late 30’s.

Wrap all of that together and you drop in some perimenopausal fun, and you’ve got the perfect storm for all to go wrong.

Not one of the dozens of practitioners that I’d worked with said a word about sleep apnea. Over and over I kept saying that my throat felt like it was collapsing, followed by an abrupt awakening, heart racing and me having to get up to go to the bathroom. This went on all night long, so of course, I was anxious, tired and miserable.

Maybe they thought that, since I’m also a health care practitioner, that I already knew about this so they dismissed that as a possibility?

Most people shrugged me off or told me that I’d need to ‘learn to live with it’. I think that’s a crock of crap because, most of the time with many, many health issues, I feel that there’s help out there….it might not be conventional or mainstream, but it’s out there….we just have to keep digging.

Last year, thanks to a patient of mine,I was introduced to this little book called ‘The Sleep Apnea Solution’ by Dr. Dylan Petkus.  Within the first few pages, he used the exact words ‘throat collapsing’. I seriously felt like it was the first time that anyone knew what I was talking about….and that I wasn’t some one-off, only-person-in-the world who was experiencing those particular set of symptoms.

And then I did an at-home sleep study with Southwest Myofunctional Therapy which confirmed that I had moderate sleep apnea.

Vindicated.

With that information, I was able to start researching and making the improvements to heal what I could.

When all of this first started, there was a doctor in our community who offered to use me as a guinea pig for his airway group and that he would connect me with different practitioners, in his circle. One of those was a dentist, who specialized in sleep apnea. Interestingly, he told me that he’d suffered a stroke, due to chronic apnea and that he was using a cpap. HOWEVER, he did NOT want to make that his way of life due to cpap machines contributing to thinning of the tissues in the back of the throat.

I personally have not been interested in cpap’s mostly because I know that, because of my sensitivity level, that I’d never be able to sleep with something attached to my head and face, nor could I handle the constant noise in my room, nor would I be comfortable breathing plastic into my throat and lungs 8 hours a night for eternity….incidentally, I’ve now heard of a class-action law suit against one of the makers for allegedly causing throat cancer in many users.

So, once I found out that this could be a contributing factor to the lack of sleep, fatigue and anxiety, I knew I had to find alternatives.

The above-mentioned book gave some great tools for immediately making changes.

I’m going to give you a high-level view of some different aspects of sleep apnea/airway obstruction for you to think on. I won’t bore you with details, as this post would become incredibly long, but I want to make you aware of some differing viewpoints than what you might get from your average interaction with your healthcare practitioner.

p.s. Apparently, all that’s taught, on average concerning sleep apnea is treatment with a cpap, so that’s what the general instruction is going to be, if you’re diagnosed with it. And while I’m giving you additional information, please take care of yourself and do what you need to do to live a robust life. The cpap is a good initial tool to get you to sleep better and to increase your oxygen levels. If you want to dive into some more help, you can add these other tools in slowly.

Let’s talk airway. Your airway is THE most important component when you’re breathing. I see little kids with small airways, as well as adults of all ages. Some of us were not blessed with a wide-open airway….many people have narrow airways which predisposes you to collapsing while in a horizontal position. In this scenario, this is considered the ‘Obstructive’ form of apnea.

Breath. I talk about breath constantly in these posts. The rate and rhythm of how you breathe directly affects the airway space. When you’re in the habit of inhaling quickly and shallowly during the day, the same pattern follows you into horizontal positions. A quick inhale while on your back will pull your tongue back and can block your airway.

Food. Food and drinks that are filled with sugar, fat and chemicals will result in inflammation. Period. It’s that simple. No arguing, no complaining. If you choose to enjoy a diet mainly from packages and eating out, likely you’re going to have inflammed nasal cavity and airway along with extra mucous production. Choosing to eat anti-inflammatory will 100% reduce your risk of airway obstuction. If you’re ready to make changes in this area, I hightly recommend my online courses:  ‘Foods for Health and Healing’ and ‘Food as Medicine’ cooking class.

These are the primary areas that we can focus on and actually DO something about.

I would highly recommend that, if you feel that you fall into the Obstructive category, that you go to your dentist or find another practitioner, if your dentist can’t do this for you, and have them do a scan of your airway. It’ll help you get a baseline for what your anatomy looks like

From there, you can start acting on ways to help open up your airway through various tools and practices. I HIGHLY recommend that you take a look at Dr. Dylan Petkus’ youtube channelon how to change your breathing rate and rhythm. You can literally start this today and start noticing changes within a few days.

This was a game changer for me! Slowing my breath down changed the frequency of nightly wake-ups, as well as my stress levels during the day. Was it the breath, itself, or was I sleeping more deeply, thereby decreasing the wake-ups? I‘m not sure, but I know that it helped immensely

The other procedure I had done was a tongue and lip revision back in August of ‘25. One of the biggest difficulties with folks who tend toward sleep apnea is that often-times, there’s a muscle that’s pulling the tongue back into the airway opening. That was my case. Once I had that released, my tongue stopped falling back. It also stopped tugging on all of the muscles in the back of my throat.

Again, I’m planting seeds of ideas for you. Does any of this resonate with you for either yourself or someone you love?

I wish someone had caught this with me 40 years ago…..I’ve wasted so much of my life being tired, anxious, sleep deprived. If someone had checked this when I was a baby, it probably would have changed the first years of my life. I’m pretty certain, based on my mom’s recount of infancy, that I experienced colic.

Often times, colicky babies are babies with latch issues stemming from  tongue and/or lip ties (or from allergic reactions to what moms are eating but that’s for another post) that cause them to take in too much air, resulting in too much gas in their digestive systems.

When families bring babies in with colic, or children with sleep disorders, anxiety or defiant behaviours, I tend to look at airway. I treat it from both a Craniosacral perspective and from an airway view.

Ready to work with me?

I’ve got SO many options for you to work within my orbit and for all different budgets!

I’m here to support you every step of the way towards a healthier, happier you. One of the ways to help you is to get the right supplements. I recommend using Fullscript, an online herbal apothecary for all of your herbal and vitamin support.

As always, keeping you as up-to-date with tools, tips and information as I can for you to live your best life.

Wishing you a wonderful week!

Yours in Health and sending big hugs 

Dr. Arjan

Photo by Karl Raymund Catabas on Unsplash