Sleep, Snoring and Your Blood Sugar

Sleep gets left out of most diabetes advice, which is a gap. It affects how your body handles glucose, and one sleep problem in particular travels closely with diabetes.

Sleep apnoea — where breathing repeatedly stops and restarts during the night — is recognised as one of the conditions associated with diabetes, and it is frequently undiagnosed. The signs are loud snoring, gasping or choking during sleep, waking unrefreshed after a full night, and heavy daytime sleepiness. If your family has mentioned your snoring, that is worth raising with your doctor rather than laughing off.

It matters because untreated sleep apnoea makes blood sugar harder to control, and treating it can improve both your sleep and your readings.

Beyond apnoea, ordinary short sleep is its own problem. Consistently sleeping badly tends to increase appetite, particularly for the exact foods you are trying to eat less of, and makes the willpower side of everything harder.

Practical things that help: a consistent bedtime, no heavy meal right before bed, and keeping the phone out of reach. If you are getting night-time lows, they can also wake you and disrupt sleep — worth checking if you are on insulin or a sulfonylurea.