I have had a chest cold for the last couple of days. On Sunday I went all day without coughing very much, but that night I coughed my lungs out. I was awake all night hacking and wheezing. Yesterday, the same thing happened. I was fine during the day but coughed all night. I remember when I was a kid I had childhood asthma and the same kind of thing would happen. A couple of other people I have talked to with asthma have told me that they have had similar expereinces.
My question: Is there anything to this? What would cause one to cough and wheeze more at night than in the daytime?
We recently are dealing with this phenomenon in our 9 year old daughter. Our doctor has referred us to an allergy specialist, while in the meantime she is taking night time medication which is working.
That’s generally the case with a cough, and especially so with asthmatic conditions. It’s normally damper at night than during the day and that tends to exacerbate coughs.
If you think you have asthma, you should see a doctor and get some medication for it. If you think you just have a cold, I would suggest elevating your head when you sleep. That generally makes me a little less likely to cough, but I will still cough a lot.
But this is winter and we’ve all got our houses shut up tight as a drum. We’ve probably got the heat running, too. I’d wager that it’s dry air rather than moist air that is aggrivating your cough. Anyway, I don’t think that humid air would irritate a cough unless it’s oppressively humid like it is in the summer.
Perhaps ElDestructo can let us know what the relative humidity is in his or her bedroom before we speculate any further.
Before you go making out your will consider this.
Your sinuses drain most efficiently when you are lying face up. This will cause ooky stuff to drain into your throat (post nasal drip) and may cause a tickle and cough (or sore throat from irritation).
Since you mentioned that this is a chest cold, I’d posit that sying on your back (or side) lessens the effect of gravity pulling junk deeper down the bronchi and allowing it to be pushed up with exhaling. This will cause a minor discomfort, enough so to cause the coughing. Further, the loosening of the phlegm (what a cool word to type) will cause the wheezing. I suggest you look into taking an OTC expectorant. Note that I did not say that you should actually take an expectorant. I am not in the business of dispensing medical advice.
If you’re in a cold climate, then I agree that the problem is probably air that is too dry. No house is airtight, and when cold air seeps into the house and gets heated the humidity of that air can drop down to superdry desert levels. It especially tends to hit you at night when your mouth and throat are drier due to reduced activity. And it’s particularly a problem when you’re trying to recover from a chest cold.
I don’t know anything about asthma or whether this kind of cough is connected to an asthmatic cough, but I get the occasional chest cold during the winter, and I have the same experience you describe—I start getting a tickle and then a cough just as I’m drifting off to sleep, and it stays with me all night if I don’t take preventive measures (see below). And I’ve found that it’s always connected to the dryness of the air.
A good solution: Run a vaporizer or humidifier in your bedroom at night. If you can also run one in the rest of the house by day, that’s good too. If you don’t have a vaporizer, then at bedtime run a hot shower in the bathroom nearest the bedroom until all the bedroom windows get steamed up (a handy trick in hotels).
For coughs that are particularly irritating and nagging: Just before bed, boil water in one of those little electric teapots that secretaries boil water in for tea at the office. Roll up some paper into a funnel, and perch yourself over the pot when the water is boiling. Take off the lid of the pot and put the funnel on top. Breath in as much steam as possible through the funnel for about 10 minutes. It will probably make you cough initially; but it will help break up the phlegm and soothe your throat. If you do it long enough (to the point where you can’t cough up any more phlegm), it will stop you from coughing at all for the entire night (though you may have to get up and steam your lungs once more in the middle of the night if a chest cold is particularly fierce). The virtue of this particular little trick is that it can be used if you can’t or don’t want to dope yourself up with cough syrup at bedtime. It takes some time and effort, but it’s all-natural, and it’s highly effective. Back it up with a vaporizer in the bedroom to humidify the air during the night and some cough drops by the bedside for the random tickle, and you’ll sleep like a princess.
I suppose I was giving a Southern California reason for worse asthma at night. We tend to have damper nights and our homes aren’t shut up as tightly as people who have seasons.
Could there also be more pollens and molds floating around at night that make people feel worse?
I’ve looked around at some asthma websites, but none seem to address the problem of nighttime coughing except to say that if you asthma and your symptoms are worse at night, you need to get your medication adjusted.
Thanks for everyone who chimed in with a reply. I’m glad to see it’s not just me!
ATTRAYANT, my very old apartment is heated with radiators, which certainly warm the place up (sometimes too well) but tend to make the air VERY dry. I try the classic solution of putting a coffee mug filled with water on all of the working radiators, but apparently that’s not enough. So it seems like a humidifier is in order.
The worst case scenario is when your place is drafty AND overheated AND it’s wintery outside. If that describes your environment, then you’re probably breathing superdry air. That’s why some folks tend to get dry, croup-y coughs in the winter that last all season.
A vaporizer would probably be the better choice because it puts out more steam than a humidifier (vaporizers usually put out hot steam, while most humidifiers put out cool vapor). Also try showering before bed instead of in the morning–anything to throw a little extra steam into the air and loosen up the phlegm in your lungs a bit before bedtime.
Hope you get feeling better soon!
Here is a thread where we chat about the effectiveness of humidifiers. Mine is a cool mist type, and based on the little hygrometer that came with it, it raises the humidity of my place within a couple of hours from the “ick” zone of 20-something percent up to the “comfort zone” of around 50-60%. It holds over a gallon of water and by morning the thing is nearly empty!
That sounds acceptable. It must be a pretty large industrial-size model. Most of the ones I’ve seen in people’s living rooms are dainty little things that are barely puffing at all. But I have to admit that I haven’t owned one yet.
I like a big vaporizer that boils away furiously and puts out a good-size cloud of steam. Also, I’ve gotten the impression that vaporizers are cheaper, if only because they are simpler–just a heating coil in a reservoir of water.
It looked like there was some good info on room humidities in that thread that you linked. I’ve got a large master bedroom in a drafty old house. When it’s good and frosty outside, I steam off well over a gallon of steam each night just in the bedroom, and the windows don’t even get misted up. Wintery temperatures outside and a big room indoors can really result in dry air, and it takes a deliberate effort to keep the air livable.
Anyway, thanks for the info and the link!
This is the humidifier I have. It stands about 10 inches high, so I would not call it large or industrial but I am corrected on one point- this site says the resivior capacity is 2.3 gallons, not one gallon.