Can you tell yourself whether you snore?
How I feel in the morning does not tell me how much sound happened overnight. When I recorded four nights and lined them up, some matched what I felt and some did not.
I can't tell my own sound myself
I have no way of knowing how loud my own snoring actually is, because I cannot hear the sound of my own night with my own ears while it happens.
My mood in the morning differs: some days I feel I slept well, some days ordinary, some days hard, but I don't think any of those feelings alone can tell me how loud the night's sound actually was. How deeply I slept and how loud the sound was seem to be two different things.
It's common to hear that someone only found out because another person pointed it out. But someone's words alone can't tell me exactly how many minutes it lasted, or how loud it actually was. I wanted to check the night itself, not my own feeling and not someone else's memory of it.
Someone else might notice and mention it, but there isn't always a person nearby to do that. The method I thought of, to check it for myself, was to just record the night itself, as it happened.
One night alone would not tell me whether it was just that particular night, so I decided to record a few nights that felt different, the same way, and line them up.
Four nights, lined up
First, the night of September 9. I felt I had slept well in the morning. The record showed loud sound for 5 minutes, peaking at 07:28. That matched how I felt: a quiet night.
Next, the night of September 12. My mood in the morning was ordinary. The record showed loud sound for 11 minutes, peaking at 09:26, a little longer than the night before.
The night of September 13 felt hard in the morning. The record showed loud sound for 22 minutes, peaking at 11:01, the longest stretch in my record so far. This was the first night where what I felt and the numbers pointed the same way.
Then the most recent night, September 15. My mood in the morning was ordinary. The record showed loud sound for 4 minutes, peaking at 07:42, the quietest of the four.
Lined up, the night that felt hard was the loudest of the four, and the nights that felt good or ordinary fell somewhere between 4 and 11 minutes. Some nights matched how I felt, and some did not. I could not tell in advance which one a given night would be.
These four nights span roughly a week, September 9 to September 15. Within that same week, the loud minutes ranged from 5 to 22, more than four times apart. I would not have guessed that my own nights could differ by that much, just from how they felt.
For all four nights, I decide the start and end myself with a tap. 9 hours and 20 minutes, 9 hours and 18 minutes, 9 hours and 2 minutes, and 8 hours and 9 minutes: the recorded length differs each time, because of how long I actually slept each night.
I could have added a short tag to any of these nights afterward, but I added none. I had no sense that anything unusual had happened; I just slept the way I usually do and let the recording end the way it usually does.
The night that felt hard, September 13, did not take any more effort to record. I tap once before sleeping and once in the morning to end it. That number of taps is the same on every night.
Recording and your record are free, always. The sound is sent nowhere. Only the loud stretches are kept.
The method itself is in another article
How I actually record the night's sound is written up in another article. What I can say here is only this: I put one phone by my pillow, and that was all. No special equipment, nothing worn on the body.
What stays, and what does not
Where the sound goes is explained the same way every time, in one sentence: "The sound is sent nowhere. Only the loud stretches are kept." For all four nights, the whole night's sound was not kept as it was; only the loud minutes and the short stretch right around them stayed on the phone.
The loudest single moment can be played back in my own ears. The second loudest is kept too, in order, and I can listen to it. Every other, quiet minute of sound is never kept at all. All four nights, from September 9 to September 15, could be checked back the same way.
Recording and keeping the record are always free. The recording stays on this phone for 14 nights, and the oldest is cleared automatically; there is nothing to delete by hand.
If there is a recording I want gone, I can delete it myself, one at a time. If I do nothing, the oldest ones just clear themselves, and there is nothing else I need to do.
What four nights still do not tell me
What I can say is that my own nights had loud sound of 5 minutes on September 9, 11 on September 12, 22 on September 13, and 4 on September 15. Four nights are not enough to say which of them is the usual one for me.
I still do not know why September 13 was the one night where what I felt and the numbers matched. It might be something from the day before, or it might just be how that particular night happened to go. Four nights are not enough to say which.
I do not want to read too much into just four nights of record. Even so, having this record is what let me confirm something as basic as the fact that how I feel alone cannot tell me how loud a night was, or which way a given night will go.
Three of the four nights fell on the side where what I felt and the numbers did not match. If mismatches outnumber matches, then trusting the feeling first might be the less reliable habit, not the more common one.
Checking, the next morning, a night's sound that my own ears cannot hear while it happens: that is what these four nights showed me I can do.
For anything about treatment or making it stop, a doctor is the surest person to ask. All Nagi can do is record the night's sound so you can hear back, in the morning, how long it was loud and when it peaked. No verdicts, only the record.