You can be in an "underslept state" even if you get 8 hrs a night. I usually am. I snore. Most of the time and very loudly. So do maybe a billion other people. It negatively impacts the quality and quantity of your sleep (and that of the people around you). It can greatly increase the risk of a whole slew of nasty diseases. And yet there is no cure and no effective treatment. As near as I can tell, no one is working on magic potion to fix it either.
There are tons of gimmicks and gadgets which promise to help, but none of them do, not really. There's surgery which is invasive and has poor long term outcomes. There's CPAP (and variants) which many people don't tolerate well, and many more people stop using as time goes on.
There are sleep studies in hospital, which are an expensive hassle and only a snapshot. There are apps which track your snoring, but they can't diagnose the cause or tell you what to do to fix it.
With such a huge potential user base, why isn't anyone working on an effective solution (not that I know what that would look like)? I would glady give up my Netflix subscription and gym membership and pay the equivalent amount to get better quality sleep.
I suffered from obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and snoring, and the two things that helped were sleeping on my side and weight loss. The latter was difficult to achieve but was the most high-leverage thing I ever did.
I had no idea at the time, but my OSA was contributing to a slew of health problems like hypertension etc., and when I removed the cause, my overall health got better.
That's all fine and well when OSA is the problem, but many people suffer from central sleep apnea and that has nothing to do with weight. Saying weight loss can mitigate the need "almost always" is an exaggeration at best.
As far as I've read, weight loss almost always helps (assuming a person is obese, which is common with OSA because it's also a symptom), but it's unusual for it to totally eliminate the need for CPAP.
I experienced the reverse: using a CPAP finally gave me enough energy to start exercising, which helped me lose weight. I imagine if I stopped using the CPAP I would slowly start losing energy again and probably stop exercising and gain the weight back. The few nights I've gone without CPAP have left me feeling awful, even without as much weight.
Everyone's physiology differs, but I've learned that weight control is 80% diet and 20% physical activity. (this assumes normal metabolism)
I went to the gym for years and my weight fluctuated a couple of pounds. Cardio was especially ineffective for any kind of weight loss.
Weights were much more effective because they increased my resting metabolism. I drastically reduced carbs from my diet, increased protein and vegetables, and the needle on the scale started moving. I ate about the same amount, but I changed the composition of my food -- no simple sugars or simple carbs.
I don't want to be prescriptive, since everyone's different, but for anyone who finds it hard to adopt an exercise routine, I would encourage them to consider changing their diets and see if that makes a difference.
There are tons of gimmicks and gadgets which promise to help, but none of them do, not really.
This is a very broad statement, and it's very very misleading.
There is, today, "an effective solution" for many people. You mentioned it. Continuous Positive Airway Pressure, CPAP for short. It has helped literally millions of people to get better sleep. I'm one of them. I was a very heavy snorer before CPAP. I don't snore any more. Not at all.
The reason you don't see great emphasis on "magic potion to fix it" is because, for many people, CPAP does fix both snoring and obstructive sleep apnea. Yes, it's a gadget, but it's the exact opposite of gimmicks.
CPAP costs perhaps $1000 for a machine that lasts 5 years. Consumables (masks, hoses, etc) are perhaps $200 per year. That's retail price. Insurance coverage should reduce those numbers considerably.
Today's CPAP machines produce a daily report that shows, literally breath by breath, how you sleep. By analyzing your breathing the machine is able to adjust its operation to keep you from snoring and to keep your body from doing respiratory arousals (which is where you partially awaken to restart your breathing when snoring closes your airway).
Unfortunately, CPAP is inexpensive. Absurdly inexpensive. That's why doctors don't really give a shit about it. Yes, you can get an ENT to put you through a sleep test, and then prescribe a machine. And then, that's it. Problem solved. The ENT will see you perhaps once a year for monitoring. Your yearly expense is under $400 (as mentioned above), so the CPAP manufacturers aren't going to send doctors on free trips to conferences in Hawaii to discuss things. They aren't going to pay the doctors large honorariums to give quick BS presentations before everyone heads out for 36 holes of golf at the resort.
For some people CPAP works out of the box, but for others it needs to be fine tuned. There's really no money in this, so the medical establishment has set a criteria of AHI < 5.0 to say "problem solved".
So people need to put a little effort into fine tuning their therapy. Mostly by adjusting CPAP settings. But also by changing masks, changing sleeping positions, changing bedtime routine, etc. My AHI is 0.0 on most nights, because I was willing to do my own tweaks without help from the medical establishment.
And I've seen measurable, quantitative improvement. For example, before CPAP my hematocrit level (red blood cells) was above normal. My body was producing more cells to help transport as much oxygen as it could from my lungs. Since CPAP, my hematocrit has dropped steadily and is now in the normal range. That's just one simple measurement. Many people have dramatic improvement with much more serious health problems.
There is a wonderful piece of free open source software. It's called SleepyHead. It reads data from the SD card in your CPAP machine and produces beautiful breath-by-breath charts. Highly recommended.
Two places to go for CPAP support are cpaptalk[0] and apneaboard[1]. There are people willing to help interpret your SleepyHead results and help you tweak your therapy. They are better than probably 99% of doctors, who, once you have a CPAP machine, have no financial incentive to continue to care about you.
There are tons of gimmicks and gadgets which promise to help, but none of them do, not really. There's surgery which is invasive and has poor long term outcomes. There's CPAP (and variants) which many people don't tolerate well, and many more people stop using as time goes on.
There are sleep studies in hospital, which are an expensive hassle and only a snapshot. There are apps which track your snoring, but they can't diagnose the cause or tell you what to do to fix it.
With such a huge potential user base, why isn't anyone working on an effective solution (not that I know what that would look like)? I would glady give up my Netflix subscription and gym membership and pay the equivalent amount to get better quality sleep.