Is 5 hours really enough?

[cpapguru38]

I must have apnea real bad. Tonight was night 4 of therapy. I used my mask the entire night (6 hours) It took me a good 45 minutes to fall asleep and I recall waking up half way at least 5 or 6 times during the night. So that is about 5 hours of actual sleep, broken up by 5 short awakenings. Despite this, I feel rested, no headache, relaxed. Perhaps just a little tired, but no brain fog and the overpowering feeling of "I need to go back to bed" is gone.

So, can 5 hours in the fashion described above, really be enough sleep? I'm just thinking how badly I must have been harming my system all these years.

[sagesteve]

No...you NEED to try to get 7 hours of STRAIGHT sleep. Newest research shows that 7 hours is optimal. 5 is too short, 8 is too long. People lived the longest on 7.

[cpapguru38]

No...you NEED to try to get 7 hours of STRAIGHT sleep. Newest research shows that 7 hours is optimal. 5 is too short, 8 is too long. People lived the longest on 7.

Last time I recall sleeping for 7 hours straight? I must have been about 16, I'm 40 now. Aint gonna happen. I have never slept all night without waking up at least 3 or 4 times. NEVER. So I guess I won't be living to be 90 then.

[kteague]

Once the equipment and therapy becomes comfortably familiar, you'll have a better idea what your usual sleep patterns will be. There's so many causes of waking during the night, that all we can really do is eliminate known causes, and you're taking care of a big one with this treatment. Making sure your pressure is therapeutic will be one way to evaluate any continuing wakings, as well as considering meds, pain relief, and bed comfort - just to name a few things. And sometimes our brain is so conditioned to fractured sleep it takes time to "learn" to stay asleep.

I think it would be hard to compare one person's wakings with another's - or even one person from night to night. Seems it would make a difference whether the wakings happen between sleep cycles or if sleep stages are disrupted.

When I first began gettting two hours of GOOD sleep at night after years of tormented sleep, comparatively there was a big difference in my daytime symptoms, but it didn't begin to be enough to make me fully functional, much less restore my body and mind. As time passes you will be better able to determine your sleep needs. Right now you are likely using a scale that just rates levels of bad. Hopefully that will improve over time.

[alnhwrd]

In the first couple of weeks I was on CPAP I would only sleep 5-6 hours and feel better than I had in years, better than sleeping 12 hours pre-cpap. Over time, as the intense sleep debt has been at least paid down a bit, I found I needed more. You may be experiancing the same thing. Its still the case that I feel better with fewer hours of sleep with low AHI than 7-9 hours with higher AHI, especially AI. I would track your total hours of sleep, how many times you remember waking up and how you felt for the first month or so in a sleep diary just to see how things progress for you. The important thing is to use the cpap all the time you are sleeping, and it sounds like you are doing that so that is great news! Keep it up!

[tattooyu]

I average around 7.5 hours of sleep myself. When I first started (I'm only on week 7 myself), I would wake up frequently throughout the night. Your body has been used to fragmented sleep. It's going to take a while to unwind your body, your mind and get used to the equipment.

At first, it took me 30-40 minutes to fall asleep. Now, I would say I average 5-10 minutes, partially due to being able to unwind faster and partially due to Pur-Sleep (http://www.pur-sleep.com) aromatherapy.

[Busa]

I had a long talk with the sleep doc and the sleep tech a while ago about time spent sleeping. I told them that I feel much better when I sleep only 5-6 hours and feel more tired with 7-8. They looked at my sleep study and found that I went through all stages of sleep twice in 5.5 hours. They explained this to me as that the average person requires between 7 and 8 hours to complete the sleep cycle twice. They then began to explain that there are so many different factors from matabolism to activity level during the previous days that can affect how long "your" body needs to recover. For me, 5 to six hours is the ticket. I find that if I do rigorous activity the number of hours increases. Other things that bring the number up are not enough sleep for the previous 3 days, alcohol, and stress. I can get down to only needing 5 hours if I am well rested for at least 3 days, no crazy workouts, and healthy eating while staying away from the brew.

Sorry for the long post, but for me, the trick is getting through the cycles twice WITHOUT waking up at all. If you can achieve this multiple nights in a row you will feel like a tazmanian devil on a good round of crack. Oh yes, bouncing off the walls you will be.