How to Actually Sleep Through Snoring
You cannot habituate to snoring, because it is irregular and that is exactly what the brain refuses to filter. What you can do is change the signal and change your response to it.
The advice to "just get used to it" is not merely unhelpful, it is asking for something that does not happen.
Habituation works on stimuli that are constant and predictable. People adapt to traffic, to a fridge, to a fan, to a railway line at the end of the garden. What they do not adapt to is irregular noise, because the brain's threat-monitoring system is specifically tuned to changes rather than to steady states.
Snoring is irregular in timing, volume and character. It is close to the ideal stimulus for defeating habituation. Partners who report becoming more sensitive over years rather than less are describing something real. The mechanism.
So the approach is not to endure it better. It is to change the acoustic situation and to change what you do when it wakes you.
Change the signal
Covered in depth elsewhere, so briefly:
Mask it, with brown noise rather than white. The single highest-yield change, and the one most people get wrong by reaching for white noise. Why brown.
Block it, with the right earplugs. Silicone putty for side sleepers. The categories compared.
Combine the two. They cover each other's weaknesses — plugs take off the high frequencies, masking fills in the low.
Get to sleep first. The highest-leverage single action available.
Move the geometry. Distance and orientation matter more than people expect. A larger bed, sleeping head-to-toe, or moving the bed away from a reflective wall all reduce what reaches your ears.
Change your response
This is the part that gets left out, and for chronic cases it matters as much as the acoustics.
When a snore wakes you, what happens next is largely under your control, and it determines whether you lose ten minutes or two hours.
The unhelpful sequence is: wake, register the noise, feel the surge of frustration, start calculating how many hours are left, begin thinking about how many nights this has happened, get angrier, become fully alert. The snoring woke you; the response kept you awake.
A better sequence is to treat the waking as neutral and get back to sleep the way you would from any other awakening. Do not check the time — knowing it is 3:40 provides no useful information and reliably makes things worse. Do not begin an inventory of grievances. Keep your eyes closed and let attention rest on something monotonous.
This is not positive thinking. The arousal caused by frustration is physiological and it is often the larger part of what keeps you awake — the noise woke you briefly, and the anger keeps you up for an hour.
If you are properly awake for more than twenty minutes, get up, go somewhere dim, do something undemanding, and return when sleepy. Lying in bed accumulating resentment next to the source of it is the worst available option, both for tonight and for the association you are building with that bed.
Attention, not volume
A useful reframe: the goal is for the snore to stop being salient, not to stop being audible.
Sound you are not attending to does not wake you, which is why you sleep through a partner's breathing, the boiler, and the road outside. Masking works partly by raising the noise floor and partly by giving your attention something else to settle on that is continuous and uninteresting.
Anything that occupies attention monotonously helps. Some people use a very quiet audiobook or a familiar podcast at low volume — familiar enough to be uninteresting, continuous enough to hold the foreground. Which devices survive being slept on.
What does not work
Trying harder to ignore it. Attending to whether you are attending to something guarantees you are.
Alcohol. Fragments the second half of your night and worsens their snoring if they are drinking too.
Nightly sleeping tablets. Fine for a crisis, a poor answer to a structural problem.
Waking them repeatedly. Costs more than it delivers.
Waiting for habituation. It is not coming.
The limit of all this
Everything here is coping, and coping has a ceiling. If you are deploying earplugs, brown noise, an early bedtime and attentional technique every night and still losing sleep, the coping has failed rather than you.
At that point the question is not how to tolerate it better. It is whether the snoring has been properly assessed, and whether separate rooms is the honest answer for now. Both are legitimate, and both beat another year of this. What the sleep loss is costing you, and doing separate rooms deliberately.