Should I ignore events that happened when awake?

Last night I woke up about 3am, and was rather annoyed that I couldn't get back to sleep. (menopause sucks, by the way.) I distinctly remember looking at the clock after I had been awake for awhile, and it said 3:33 and that was even more irritating. So this morning when I looked at Sleepyhead, there is lots of activity during that period -- here is the whole night:


and here is a closeup of the cluster of events:


The way I understand it, the machine can't tell if you are awake or asleep, and some stuff that is dangerous and abnormal when you are asleep is actually pretty much innocuous and normal when you are awake. My AHI is really low even with those events, but am I correct in thinking that they aren't measuring anything alarming?

Yes...ignore..mentally remove any known awake period flagged events from the overall evaluation for the night.
Awake stuff doesn't count.
Hold your breath for 20 seconds...not a big deal is it? That's an awake central (Clear Airway) event duration 20 seconds. No air moving but airway is open. The machine normally will flag it as a central but sometimes it can flag it as something else. It's easily confused by awake breathing irregularities and our awake breathing is MUCH more irregular than we might think it is and especially when compared to asleep breathing.
Not to mention the semi awake breathing.

These machines are really supposed to be used for establishing patterns and trends and not dissecting each little thing under the microscope ...especially when we are awake.

Yeah, the other thing is I think I coughed once in there, too. Or there have certainly been a couple of times that I have been awake or half asleep and coughed and thought I should note the time so that I could check later to see what the machine recorded for data.

Yes, it's only sleep-wake junk or SWJ.

Pugsy wrote:Yes...ignore..mentally remove any known awake period flagged events from the overall evaluation for the night.
Awake stuff doesn't count.
Hold your breath for 20 seconds...not a big deal is it? That's an awake central (Clear Airway) event duration 20 seconds. No air moving but airway is open. The machine normally will flag it as a central but sometimes it can flag it as something else. It's easily confused by awake breathing irregularities and our awake breathing is MUCH more irregular than we might think it is and especially when compared to asleep breathing.
Not to mention the semi awake breathing.

These machines are really supposed to be used for establishing patterns and trends and not dissecting each little thing under the microscope ...especially when we are awake.

The only problem then is that it all goes on your "Permanent Record", meaning it becomes a part, even if ever so little, of the big picture that the sleep Dr. (and Insurance) evaluate you by. Of course some Sleep Dr.s are smart enough to discount it, for the most part. But not every Sleep Dr. is also a Rhodes Scholar.

TyroneShoes wrote:The only problem then is that it all goes on your "Permanent Record", meaning it becomes a part, even if ever so little, of the big picture that the sleep Dr. (and Insurance) evaluate you by. Of course some Sleep Dr.s are smart enough to discount it, for the most part. But not every Sleep Dr. is also a Rhodes Scholar.

We can't do a thing about what the doctor's do or don't do...nothing.... but 99.9% of them look at hours of use and maybe AHI and in the long run minor awake events won't make a huge impact on overall numbers as long as you don't spend half the night awake...every night.
If the AHI isn't horrible with the awake events included it sure won't be horrible once hundreds of hours of asleep data gets mixed in with a small amount of awake time. Law of numbers will prevail.

Insurance companies only care if you use the machine...they don't care about the actual data..they never look at it or evaluate it. Hours of use is all they care about. There is no one on the insurance end that does any sort of evaluation of actual data or the reports. Once compliance requirements are met...insurance isn't even in the picture any more.

OK, I realize all of that. Maybe I was being a little too "tin foil hat" a minute ago.

TyroneShoes wrote: The only problem then is that it all goes on your "Permanent Record", meaning it becomes a part, even if ever so little, of the big picture that the sleep Dr. (and Insurance) evaluate you by. Of course some Sleep Dr.s are smart enough to discount it, for the most part. But not every Sleep Dr. is also a Rhodes Scholar.

you're funny... most sleep doctors don't even look at the detail, based on the reports we get from people here.

TyroneShoes wrote:Maybe I was being a little too "tin foil hat" a minute ago.

Maybe cut back on the tin foil a bit and "what iffing"..or you will drive yourself crazy worrying about stuff you have zero control over.

IF and that's a really big IF...docs even look at the data they will look at long term trends and patterns first and the law of numbers will pretty much take care of minor skewing of the data by awake events.

Generally ignore it unless you have something like really long periods of not breathing. It seems to me that it would be unusual to hold your breath for 30 seconds or more unless you're consciously doing so.