Sleep syncing & mouth taping: The solution to sleeplessness and snoring?

Dreaming of taping a snorer's mouth shut? Struggling to snooze? Stacey Morrison finds out if mouth taping, sleep syncing and the latest apps and technology could be the secret to getting a good night's rest.We spend a third of our lives sleeping and yet so many of us have trouble with it.So when we hear about new theories on how we might improve our sleep, it's not surprising that people want to try them out. This week on Healthy or Hoax, Stacey Morrison finds out whether sleep syncing using the latest apps and technology could improve our wellbeing and whether taping your mouth shut will help with the biggest barrier to a good night's sleep - snoring.What is sleep syncing?Professor Leigh Signal from the Sleep/Wake Research Centre at Massey University is an expert in fatigue management and sleep health. She says sleep syncing is really just about understanding that you've got a circadian biological clock and then aligning your sleep pattern or your sleep schedule with that clock.While the term "sleep syncing" may be new to some, sleep scientists have been trying to spread this kind of message for years."The crux of it is spot-on scientifically," Signal says."There are some slightly off base messages happening as well, though, so I think it's good to explore it a little bit more."Signal says the human body's amazing circadian biological clock helps to keep us in step with the day/night cycle. While we are all hardwired to sleep at night and stay awake during the day, that doesn't mean all our clocks are ticking away in time."I am slightly more an evening type person, so I like to go to bed a little later," Signal says."Most of us are, somewhere kind of in the middle, although there are a few people out there that are extreme morning or evening types."How do you sync your sleep?Essentially, it's about having a regular bedtime and a regular waking time."In an ideal world, perhaps, so we should be going to bed when we feel sleepy, and we should be waking up, when we naturally wake," Signal says."But many of us also have jobs that don't allow us to do that. And then we have teens, for example, who just biologically, their circadian system has shifted during puberty so that they can't go to sleep until later, and then they want to wake up later. But that's not how the school system currently works."Generally speaking, we tend to sync our sleep with our work/life schedules rather than our circadian rhythms.Can technology help?…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details