Being overweight can come with many side effects and significantly impact your quality of life. Obesity can limit your physical health and can be life-threatening in some cases. Excess weight causes your body to work harder, and the extra work isn’t limited to daytime hours. One often overlooked side effect of obesity is its impact on your sleep. If you’re heavier than you’d like to be, there is a reasonable chance that you last got a decent night’s sleep a while ago. If this is true, our office can help determine if your weight may be the cause behind low-quality sleep.
Here are a few ways that obesity contributes to poor sleep and how we can help.
Asthma
Being overweight can increase the likelihood of having asthma-related symptoms, which can impact the quality of your sleep. Nighttime asthma symptoms can make trying to sleep a miserable experience due to shortness of breath, coughing, and wheezing. Being overweight raises the chances of these symptoms occurring, although experts are unsure why.
GERD
Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease, or GERD, occurs when the contents of your stomach leak into your esophagus, causing a host of issues. For instance, GERD symptoms generally occur when someone is lying down, leading to coughing, heartburn, sore throat, and other symptoms, disrupting sleep patterns and leaving you groggy the next day. GERD symptoms are typically chronic in nature and worsen if someone is overweight.
Osteoarthritis
Another way that being overweight can disrupt sleep is due to complications from osteoarthritis. Overweight individuals often deal with the additional strain on their joints, which, over time, wears down cartilage and causes the bones to grind–––which is painful. The discomfort from osteoarthritis can be so severe that it wakes patients up at night and makes falling back asleep challenging.
Obstructive Sleep Apnea
One of the more well-known links between weight and quality of sleep is Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA). The chances of someone developing OSA increase if they are overweight because fat deposits in the airway can block airflow, causing you to snore, choke, gasp for air, and feel groggy the next day due to the process happening several times each night.
If you or a loved one have been searching for answers regarding your sleep quality, our office can help. One of the best ways to determine what’s behind your sleep struggles is to conduct a sleep study. For more on how we can help you get to the root of your issue, please schedule a consultation with our office by calling us today at 212.873.6036.