Upper Airway Resistance Syndrome and the Real Fix for Sleep

I am writing this just a couple of hours before the Leo New Moon Solar Eclipse. I am also synched up with my own moon, which sparked an entire journey, and eventually a course I created called The Return. But that is a story I will save for another time.

This eclipse lands in my third house, the house of communication, the mind, my daily life, and the nervous system. I have major placements there. So the timing makes sense, and I see the pull to write this tucked under the covers as another sign from the universe.

The irony is that I cozied up to write a newsletter about how supportive our Maple Mallows and Cocoa Mocha Ritual can be for sleep. I had just received another testimonial from a customer who said our mallows had changed her relationship with sleep, a challenge she had carried for almost twenty years.

With what I'm about to share, you'll understand why there is almost nothing more meaningful, or more soul enriching, for me to hear.

But it went from that newsletter to this instead. Sitting in bed writing, I felt called to share the deepest, most cathartic topic of my life.

The topic of sleep.

It is the biggest topic I know. It has touched every corner of my life for as long as I can remember. I mean that literally. Some of my earliest memories are sleep trauma, terror, hysteria, aloneness.

I want to say something first. I am a storyteller. It is part of my DNA, all over my third house. But this is absolutely not my story. It does not define me. It is one giant, excruciating chapter in a much longer journey, the kind that gave me the determination to excavate and unravel what I came here to heal.

I know this now, and I am grateful and very proud of the woman I have come to be.

I have also had some incredibly beautiful moments and experiences along the way. And I truly believe the best is yet to come.

The Beginning

I came in with the cord wrapped around my neck. An emergency C-section. My mother told me the story much later in life. She was terrified, made to feel incapable, yelled at by the anesthesiologist. My father, her protector, was shooed out of the room. I was taken from her for many, many hours. Separated. Alone. Abandoned before I had words for any of it.

I had a tongue tie and a small airway. My ability to breathe was compromised from the very start. These imprints, plus whatever I carried in from the womb and the ancestral line before me, created a distortion in my limbic system. A subtle current of unsafety that masqueraded as emotional and healing challenges from day one.

I had no idea what was wrong with me growing up. I looked fine. I was praised for my looks, thin and lean and told pretty. But I stayed small. I did not want to be truly seen, even as I craved love and attention like nothing else.

By five years old I remember being terrified of sleep. Hysterical outside my parents' door, in a house so small you could not open one bedroom door without hitting another. Yet I felt so far apart. The terror of being alone at night was enormous. My mother, exhausted from her hysterical child and out of answers one night, said we were taking me to get a physical. To a five year old, that felt like being committed. Crazy at five years old.

That is how I lived. Wildly sensitive on top of it all. I felt everything, other people's pain, homelessness, domestic abuse, animals, suffering on the other side of the world. Life was terrifying, I could not sleep, and none of it made sense.

And the rule underneath it all was simple.

Do not let anyone know.

Do not let them think something is wrong with you, or with us.

I lived under a mask. A happy, blond, cute clothes kind of mask.

The Fix Cycle

The hysteria turned physical. Chronic ear infections, strep throat, colds, antibiotics on repeat.

Fix, fix, fix. The doctors were supposed to help.

No one did.

By eighteen it looked different. They could not figure it out, so they labeled it with the uncurable things instead. Mono. Chronic fatigue. Epstein-Barr. Insomnia. Depression. I remember insisting, I am not depressed, I cannot sleep, this is something more than that.

It took until my thirties for someone to actually see it. A dentist, of all people, looked at my profile and saw the distortion in my face, my jaw, my neck, my teeth, and recognized an airway issue.

He told me there are people walking around like zombies because of this. You feel like you are being choked at night subconsciously and wake up constantly throughout the night so you literally never feel safe enough to let go. 

It is different than traditional sleep apnea, which tends to affect overweight men later in life. What I had was called upper airway resistance syndrome, UARS. It affects young, thin people and leads to deep somatic distress in the body, often misdiagnosed as something else.

I was one of them.

Thirty years, and that is what it took to hear it.

Through all of it, the terror and the pain and the years that never felt normal, I stayed determined. I moved to Los Angeles in 2015 to heal. I saw every specialist in California for jaw and airway.

Consults for surgeries, some barbaric, cracking open the face, rewiring the jaw, appliance after appliance.

Three years in, I stopped trying so hard and landed on a CPAP machine.

It helped from the beginning. I appreciated the logic of it, the machinery of it. It stabilized a lot.

But it left two things untouched.

It never addressed the lifelong trauma underneath the airway issue. It could never support the control and rigidity I had to surrender to actually let go and sleep. And I knew that a device was not a fix. This was something I would use forever. It did not change the structure of my airway. Eventually it gets harder to manage, not easier. I had not even met my life partner at this point. Dating with this forever?

I used it gratefully for a bit and stopped looking for a cure. I told myself these were my war wounds. I mouth taped too, something I have done for ten years now, cuts around my nose and mouth included. 

A Different Approach

During the pandemic I heard a podcast about another dentist, one who worked with airway, sleep, and TMJ through gentle appliances that realigned the jaw in step with the natural cranial and facial structure.

More holistic. Less barbaric. My body said yes to it immediately.

I booked a call and flew to Oakland the next week. I flew once a month for the entire pandemic. I still cannot quite believe I did that, all the money, time, and energy. Supportive therapies came alongside it to help the jaw's slow realignment. Three years of that. It was nonstop. My life became fixing myself while supporting other people's dreams, all at once.

I was moving at a hundred miles an hour, still hell bent on fixing myself, and I missed the single most important piece of the whole puzzle.

Nervous system safety. Inner, felt safety.

I lived in high alert. Hypervigilant. Controlling. Never letting myself rest long enough to integrate anything. I felt alone. I had lost so much time. I was on a self built wheel of go, go, go.

And underneath all of the protocols and appointments and research was still the same little girl outside her parents' bedroom door, terrified to let go enough to sleep.

My professional life thrived through all of it. I could throw myself into other people's businesses, all of them in the health and healing space, and collapse in private once my part was done. No one saw how much I was suffering.

I understood health and healing on paper. I was a genius at it, on paper. I was wise. People trusted me.

Yet I was hardly embodying a single bit of it.

My nervous system was wrecked. I could not fully trust myself, and some days I could not believe in anything larger than me either, not while I was suffering this much, this alone.

Where Erik Comes In

The rest of the healing happened through relationship. Through Erik. And it was intense.

In the beginning I projected so much pain onto him. He was dealing with his own pain, and when I saw it in him, it made me deeply uncomfortable. I did not want to feel it in myself. It was too intense.

But I was committed. I did the work. Yes, the courses and the protocols. Yes, the best practitioners. But the most important thing I did was feel those sensations in my body, those terrified, scared, lonely, lame parts. The ones I locked deep in the basement and dared not let out.

I did it. I now hold space for all the wild, fractured parts of myself. I still do this every day. It is not easy, and it is not pretty.

One of my teachers says, “Never let an opportunity slip you by to meet another part of you that needs to be met.”

This is what true wholeness and healing actually is. I know it is a cliché, but you really do become your own healer. The one you have been waiting for.

Through claiming back the projections I had been carrying, I finally felt, in my body, what safety actually is.

I began learning to be a woman who softens. Who trusts herself. Her man. Who builds an actual relationship with something larger than herself.

At the same time, I was moving from advising other people’s businesses to building one of my own with Erik. We both needed a felt sense of safety before we could build anything that would last.

Erik is also where I met a different depth of nourishment.

I was already eating clean, organic, doing everything right on paper. But there is a level of ancestral nourishment the body recognizes on contact, something older than farm-to-table restaurants and trendy ingredients.

Food made slowly. Meat. Minerals. Collagen. Gelatin. Bone broth. Food with substance. Food that tells the body there is enough.

His food is love, bottled. Medicine in a jar.

Slowly I began to understand that nourishment and safety were not separate conversations.

A body that has spent its life bracing needs to be fed deeply. Loved and cared for.

It needs minerals. It needs protein. It needs rest. It needs rhythm. It needs consistency. It needs to know there will be more tomorrow.

This is the root of why I care about food the way I do now. And why Feral Foods could never just be a food company to me.

It came from my own return.

What Actually Changed It

Therapies, CPAP, jaw alignment, healers. All of it mattered. All of it got me stable.

But the two things that actually moved the needle were nervous system regulation, real, felt safety inside the body, and ancestral, mineral rich food.

Collagen. Meat. Bone broth.

The kind of nourishment my body was asking for the entire time I was busy trying to fix myself with logic.

For most of my life I thought healing meant finding the thing that was wrong and fixing it.

Now I think so much of healing is creating the conditions where the body no longer has to fight so hard.

Safety.

Nourishment.

Trust.

Self love and compassion.

And enough time for the body to remember what it already knows how to do.

The sleep fix nobody tells you is not a fix at all.

It is a return.

The Future is Feral 💫