How to Stop Snoring Tonight: Practical Steps From a Sleep Clinician

I'm Dana Whitfield, RRT, and before I give you tonight's action list, I want to be upfront: there is no single trick that silences every kind of snoring in one night for every person, and anyone promising a guaranteed overnight cure is overselling. What I can offer, from fourteen years of coaching patients through exactly this problem, is a set of changes that meaningfully reduce snoring for a large share of people, starting the very night you try them, plus an honest note on which ones tend to work for which kind of snoring.

This is the single highest-yield question to answer before doing anything else. Ask your partner, or record a few minutes of audio on your phone propped on the nightstand, and note whether the snoring gets noticeably louder or only happens when you're on your back. For a large share of snorers, this is the whole story — flat on the back, the tongue and soft palate sag backward into the airway; on the side, gravity works in your favor instead of against you.

If that's your pattern, tonight's most useful step is simply not sleeping on your back. The old trick of sewing a tennis ball into the back of a t-shirt works on this exact principle, though most people find it too uncomfortable to keep up. A gentler version I recommend more often now is a wearable like the Sleep Connection Anti-Snore Wristband, which senses snoring and delivers a light vibration that nudges you to shift position without a full wake-up. It's not going to help snoring that has nothing to do with position, but for the back-sleeping pattern, it's the most sustainable version of positional therapy I've seen patients actually keep using past the first week.

If you're going to test one lifestyle variable tonight, make it alcohol. Alcohol relaxes throat muscles more than natural sleep does, which is why snoring is often noticeably worse — or exclusively present — on nights with even one or two evening drinks. If you typically have a glass of wine or a beer within a few hours of bed, try skipping it tonight and see whether your partner notices a difference. The same logic applies to sedating antihistamines and sleep medications when they're not medically necessary — they relax the airway in a similar way.

If congestion is part of the picture — even mild, seasonal congestion you've stopped noticing — clearing it before bed can help immediately. A saline rinse or spray, a warm shower to loosen congestion, or an appropriate short-term decongestant if allergies are flaring can open the nasal passage enough to reduce that whistly, higher-pitched nasal snoring. An internal nasal dilator or an external strip applied right before bed works on the same principle mechanically, gently holding the nostrils open rather than relying on medication.

Quick self-check: breathe through your nose with your mouth closed, then gently press one nostril shut at a time. If one side is clearly harder to breathe through, nasal-focused remedies are more likely to help tonight. If your nose feels clear and you still snore heavily, especially on your back, the issue is more likely at the throat level, and nasal products alone won't move the needle much.

Raising the head of the bed a few inches, or using an extra pillow to elevate your upper body, can reduce the backward sag of throat tissue for some people, similar in principle to avoiding flat back-sleeping. It's not a dramatic fix on its own, but it's free to try tonight and it stacks reasonably well with the position and nasal steps above. Just avoid propping your head up so much that your neck bends awkwardly, since that can actually narrow the airway instead of opening it.

Everything above is aimed at ordinary snoring — the kind that's loud and annoying but doesn't involve breathing actually stopping. If you or a partner have noticed pauses in breathing followed by gasping or choking, or if you're waking up feeling exhausted no matter how much sleep you get, that's a different situation, and the fix isn't a better pillow position — it's a conversation with your doctor about a sleep evaluation. I cover how to tell the difference in more detail in my article on snoring versus sleep apnea, but the short version is: witnessed breathing pauses and unexplained daytime sleepiness deserve a real medical look, not another home remedy.