Opinions on partial night therapy

So, I'm still having trouble acclimating to the CPAP, and I seem to have fallen into a pattern which seems to be working pretty well for me... but I'm not sure if it means that I'm actually getting anything out of the CPAP...

What I've been doing is sleeping with the CPAP on for 4-5 hours and then when I wake up and feel uncomfortable, I take it off and sleep without it the rest of the night.

It's weird, on the CPAP, according to the machine, I'm getting between 1 and 5 events per hour, so it seems to be helping, but when I sleep with it on, I just do not feel rested at all when I wake up.

However, if I take it off and sleep my last few hours unencumbered, I feel a bit better rested in the morning.

So I was thinking maybe I'd continue this pattern until my body gets so comfortable with the CPAP that I no longer wake up uncomfortable from it in the middle of the night, and so that I start waking feeling refreshed instead of exhausted when I've been sleeping with it.

So what I'm curious about is has anyone else tried this, and more importantly, do you think it's a GOOD strategy (in that it will probably allow me to keep trying for much longer than I might otherwise, and maybe slowly acclimate to this for the long term) or a BAD strategy (in that I'm really only partially using the CPAP, and the fact that I'm able to sleep some without it may de-incentivize (which isn't a word, but go with it) full adoption and acclimation)?

Liam: why speak in simple, basic, actual words when you can make up polysyllabic nightmare faux-words to get your point across?

Well.....some therapy is better than no therapy but what you are planning has the potential for developing into a really bad habit and bad habits are easy to make and difficult to break.

FWIW...I wouldn't expect anyone to feel more rested with only 4 to 5 hours of sleep...cpap or not. It's simply not enough hours of sleep for most people. So the fact that you wake up unrefreshed after 5 hours of cpap...doesn't surprise me. If I don't get around at least 7 hours of sleep I don't feel so great either but it's because I didn't get enough sleep.

If you broke both legs, would you only get one treated?
Not trying to be harsh, but perspective. . .

Well, let me put it this way, Pugsy: For the first week (well, 6 days) I wore the mask all night long. By the end of that week, I was sleeping through the night (with several wakings, but that's not unusual), the CPAP was telling me that I was down to less than 5 events per hour, and yet each day I felt like ANOTHER day had passed without any sleep. By the end, I was just dog tired, feeling like I wasn't RESTING at all during my nights' sleep.

On the 7th night, I didn't INTENTIONALLY take it off, I got up to use the restroom after about 5 hours and was in such a stupor that I fell asleep before putting the mask back on... and woke up feeling significantly more rested than I had for the preceding week. Not great, of course, one 4 hour block of time doesn't make up for a week, but I felt a LOT better.

So the next night I tried that again, and again I woke up feeling like I used to feel (which isn't great, but better than I'd been feeling with CPAP).

I'm not sure why I'm not getting restful sleep with the CPAP on, but I'm not. I'm hoping that changes, but honestly I can't take what it was putting me through until it does. I was becoming a walking zombie.

So that's why I got to where I am, thinking that half the night is at least slowly allowing me to become used to the thing, but without being barely able to function throughout the day.

Honestly I think at that point, I had really reached the point where we weren't talking about half-time CPAP vs full-time CPAP, but rather half-time CPAP vs giving up entirely and going back to sleeping without it.

Does that change your opinion?

Liam, sleepy.

Liam1965 wrote: What I've been doing is sleeping with the CPAP on for 4-5 hours and then when I wake up and feel uncomfortable, I take it off and sleep without it the rest of the night.

Liam: why speak in simple, basic, actual words when you can make up polysyllabic nightmare faux-words to get your point across?

palerider: wondering why a relative 'old timer' would have missed all of the strident 'DON'T DO THAT' posts over the years.

Probably because when I wasn't using CPAP, it didn't make sense for me to stick around here and pontificate about a subject I knew nothing about. Can you give me a quick synopsis of why it's bad?

Liam, who wonders why this case should have been any different.

By allowing yourself to not use your mask part of the night, you are just reinforcing your bodies acceptance of that and at the same time harming your own therapy at the same time.

You need to break that trend and wear it all the time.

Stop forgetting to put the mask back on for a week or so, and it will be a habit. You should go through the same process every time you lie down, even after you get up for a break. If you do that, you will build it into a process you do every time you lie down.

Liam1965 wrote:Probably because when I wasn't using CPAP, it didn't make sense for me to stick around here and pontificate about a subject I knew nothing about. Can you give me a quick synopsis of why it's bad?

Liam, who wonders why this case should have been any different.

well, unless you're the rare person who finds it easy to break bad habits, you're giving yourself a bad habit that's going to be, as Pugsy already said, hard to break.

Palerider, who's wondering if Liam got distracted with the second part of Pugys's message and overlooked the first part.

I get the bad habit aspect of it, I do.

However, I was probably 1-2 nights away from giving up entirely due to the lack of restful sleep. I was literally unable to do much of my job and just kind of zombie-ing through life. So I look at this as a coping mechanism to keep me trying rather than giving up because the CPAP was not allowing me to rest at all.

Liam, who would really like for this to work.

Liam...Strange

So I am going to go out on a long skinny limb here...
When you wear the cpap ...your sleep is fractured and fragmented and you wake up often and eventually say to hell with it and sleep without it and that sleep with cpap is not fractured or fragmented so you feel like that sleep is "better sleep".

Is that correct?

Liam1965 wrote:I get the bad habit aspect of it, I do.

However, I was probably 1-2 nights away from giving up entirely due to the lack of restful sleep. I was literally unable to do much of my job and just kind of zombie-ing through life. So I look at this as a coping mechanism to keep me trying rather than giving up because the CPAP was not allowing me to rest at all.

Liam, who would really like for this to work.

I think it's important to figure out why you're not getting good sleep, instead of just not using the machine.

have you posted charts of your nights?

palerider wrote:I think it's important to figure out why you're not getting good sleep,

Bingo.

If worse comes to worse and the choices are half the night with the machine and the other half not...or not using the machine at all....I am not going to tell you it is ever okay to not use the machine. Just not going to happen.
I also wouldn't just give up and accept that half the night is "okay" without doing some hard detective work to try to figure out why the sleep quality with the mask isn't so great. I would be turning over all the stones I could find to try to figure out why the mask/machine has a negative impact on sleep quality....that's assuming that my above question out on the limb you give a "yes" answer to.

You are in great hands here with the regulars who have already responded to this thread (and thanks again to them for helping me in the past).

I'll add my two cents from my own perspective: do everything you can, right away and consistently, to wrap the xpap-habit into your life. Not doing so only delays what you have to do for your health. As but one example, sometimes you can use the exhaustion from the adjustment in your favor; your body becomes so exhausted that one night it doesn't resist as much, and you sleep through the night with the xpap and then it learns it can do that.

Also, keep in mind that there are multiple possibilities for why using the xpap might not feel very restful in the beginning. Some may even be happening at the same time to various degrees. You may need to adjust pressures and pay attention to leaks; perhaps those are interrupting your sleep cycle. Your face may be changing shape as you drift off, resulting in small micro leaks that barely wake you up, which you don't remember and which keep you from becoming well-rested; in my case, using the partial-taping method helped with that. Your body is also going through an adjustment process, and it may be a while before it adjusts to more healthful sleep; for many of us, that full adjustment can take months and months although big jumps in improvement thankfully occur along the way and sooner. Or there may be other non OSA things going on that will only become apparent as you get used to xpap.

But to me, the highest priority should be adjusting fully to the use of xpap. None of the other issues are fully-addressable until you do.

Hang in there and good luck!

I really don't know, honestly. The first time I tried it, I never could get to sleep at all. 10 years ago, I finally gave up because I would literally lie awake all night until I finally got so angry and frustrated that I'd fling the mask off violently and then sleep for the remainder of the night. I don't think I ever fell asleep with it on once.

This time around, I do fall asleep, and the quality of sleep in terms of how often I awaken is roughly the same as without the mask, it's just that I feel so exhausted when I wake up, AS IF I had not fallen asleep, although I did.

So it doesn't seem quite like the typical stories I read about it disturbing sleep, people sleeping fitfully because of the (minor) discomfort or being unable to get to sleep, this seems to be something different, like somehow I'm falling into a coma-esque sleep that isn't including dreams. Of course, that's just one possible explanation, not a medical diagnosis, but...

It's like gorging yourself on something like wood that is indigestible to human beings... you could eat and eat and eat until you felt like you were going to burst and still be just as weak from hunger as ever, because you weren't actually getting any benefit from what you were consuming. So to, I can sleep, but I don't seem like I'm getting any benefit from the sleep.

Liam, apparently different than most other people....