None of the below is a medical advice. If you have or suspect medical problems always go to a medical professional first.
There is so much, too much, content on the internet about sleep improvement that we need more opinionated pieces like this one that summarizes it all in an opinionated highly subjective way. I went through many years of terrible sleep myself and tried everything I could find for fixing it, this included: specialists, diets, gadgets, furniture, supplements, lifestyle changes, etc. I wasn’t diagnosed with anything severe, so it was is not a clinical case. But I feel like most people with sleep problems fall in this category — not too serious to be officially medically treated, but serious enough to wreck your life. This guide is for people like me and I hope it helps you too.
How do you know if your sleep problems went too far? If you have even brief and rare hallucinations, if it starts creating physiological problems like new heart conditions, if worrying about sleep prevents you from sleeping, if you regularly wake up in the middle of the night so upset that you woke up that you start raging, punching pillow, running around, shouting, etc.
If you come from a longevity community, sleep is your top priority. You can do other low effort things like taking some safe supplements or minor diet changes, but if you have to choose what to spend your limited energy and time on then invest it all into sleep improvement, at least until it's fixed.
There are many ways how longevity interventions can be categorized, but to make it more accessible and actionable I simply split them into tiers.
Your go-to interventions.
There is a lot that can be potentially wrong with how you breathe during sleep that you aren’t even aware of. Calling it all a sleep apnea is an extremely narrow oversimplification. Your breathing pathways have lots of soft tissues, cartilages, and mucus surfaces flapping, extending, expanding, etc. You need to know if you have any bottlenecks even if you don’t fix them.
Turbinates are gill-like structures deep in your nose that moisten and warm up the air as it passes through. It is really important to understand what they do! They respond very eagerly to air that is too cold or too dry by enlarging and producing more mucus, which might reduce or completely collapse your airways. If you are unlucky with an anatomy you might have almost no room for your turbinates to expand, which means you need to be extremely mindful of what triggers it. Understanding turbinates is especially important if you use AC or your bedroom air is dry (AC also dries out the air because they partially act as dehumidifiers).
Things that can prevent your turbinates from expanding: