12 tips to sleep with a cough

Experts reveal the most common types of cough and the remedies to fix them so you can get a restful night’s sleep

Night-time coughing can wreck your sleep pattern and lead to lethargy and fatigue the next morning. Millions of us self-medicate for coughs, with the market for cough, cold and sore throat remedies worth £583 million in 2023.
Yet while coughs are great sleep disruptors, they also provide a protective reflex.
“Coughing is essentially a reflex designed to protect our airways and prevent the aspiration of foreign bodies into the lungs,” says Dr Adrian Draper, a consultant chest physician at HCA’s London Bridge Hospital.
“Coughing also helps you clear secretions, we each make about a litre to a litre and a half of these every day in the body and we swallow these subconsciously. 
“There are cilia (hair like projections) that line the windpipes which are carrying the mucus up to clear it. There are nerve receptors in the airways that communicate with the brain stem, and essentially disease, or any other stimulant can create the urge to cough, causing muscles to contract in the chest and abdomen.”
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“These range from respiratory infections, including viruses and asthma, to smoking or allergies,” says Dr Aimée Brame, a consultant physician at the Royal Brompton Hospital, London. Other causes include acid reflux, where stomach acid rises up to the throat causing irritation, prescription drug side effects and postnasal drip, where mucus from the nasal passages drips down the back of the throat causing irritation.”
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Sometimes called productive coughs – these are the type where you bring up phlegm that is blocking or irritating your airways. Phlegm can build up at the back of your throat when you lie down in bed and trigger coughing at night. “The most common cause of this is an upper respiratory tract infection such as colds or flu,” says Dr Draper. “This is a sign of inflammation in your airways, and your body is trying to shift the mucus by coughing.
“Most of these types of coughs will go away within three weeks, but if your cough persists and you are bringing up green phlegm you may need to see a health professional and may need antibiotics prescribed to treat the underlying infections.”
Dr Brame says wet coughs can also be caused by chronic lung conditions such as chronic bronchitis (prolonged inflammation of the airways) or cystic fibrosis, a hereditary condition that causes the build-up of additional mucus.
Also known as an unproductive cough as it doesn’t produce mucus, dry coughs can have a number of causes including hypersensitivity of nerves in the airway after an infection (known as post-infection cough), asthma, allergies, acid reflux (where stomach acid comes up and irritates the throat), smoking and whooping cough.
“The most common type of dry cough at the moment is the post-viral or post-infection cough,” says Dr Brame.
A number of prescribed drugs, such as ACE inhibitors used to treat blood pressure, can also produce a dry cough starting at some point in the year after beginning a course, see your doctor if this happens when you change to a different blood pressure drug.
“In medical terms, there’s technically no such thing as a tickly cough, but that’s how many patients describe the sensation of a type of cough, which causes  a feeling of irritation at the upper part of the throat,” says Dr Draper.
“One cause may be a condition called postnasal drip where mucus drips down into the back of the throat from the nose, causing irritation in the throat.”
Dr Brame adds that “tickly coughs can be either wet or dry. There’s quite a lot of overlap, but tickly coughs affect the upper airways and can be caused by clearing your throat of phlegm, acid reflux and irritation from breathing in chemicals or allergens.”
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 “A solid evidence base on how best to treat a wet cough is sadly lacking,” says Dr Draper. But anecdotally some people do find some of the following tips helpful.
“Any cough that persists longer than three weeks may benefit from a prescription medicine such as antibiotics or steroids, or need further investigations to find out the underlying cause,” says Dr Draper.
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Tickly coughs can be both wet and dry coughs, so use some of the measures above. 
Other tips you might want to try:
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