zonker's crib--somewhere over the rainbow

[zonker]

feeling poorly through it all.
.
.
i slept my typical sleep pattern of about an hour at a time.

Think these could be related? I didn't know about this hour at a time sleep pattern. Also don't know where to go with trying to help. Maybe Pugsy will be along to give you her "sleep detective interrogation".

but i decided to bump my minimum to 11. not a good move, as it turned out. i stuck with as long as i could, but eventually i turned it back down to ten. i couldn't tolerate the pressure.

This same thing happened to me when I tried to jump straight from 10 to 12 min pressure. Strange breathing pattern, would end up getting light headed. That's when I started moving up in small increments at weekly intervals, made it easy for me. YMMV.

to the point about awaking each hour and feeling poorly; no. my sleep pattern has, for the last three years, been asleep for maybe the 1st hour and a half, then about every hour. truth to tell, i don't even remember if i did that before i was on a machine or not.

have brought that up before, but have been told that "everyone wakes up throughout the night" and that i should just "roll over and go back to sleep". i seem to remember being told that i would get over it and not notice anymore.

still waiting for that to happen.

THAT"S what i was trying to say-light headed! i kept thinking "fizzy" or some such, which didn't quite describe it. thanks for that. also, thanks for the recommendation to bump it up slowly. that's been said before, but i haven't tried it yet with THIS machine under the "not-for-her" setting.

maybe will give it a go tonight.

[zonker]

Maybe Pugsy will be along to give you her "sleep detective interrogation".

Bright lights, rubber hoses, phone books, etc.

erm, tie me up and tie me down?

[Pugsy]

Give me a minute....gotta go find my handcuffs.
Second thought..nix that idea because you would probably enjoy it way too much.

Here's the deal about waking during the night...yes...it's normal to wake some...like at the end of REM stage sleep.
Normally we aren't awake long enough to form a memory though when that happens.
When someone tells me that they remember waking up a half a dozen times during the night the I can pretty much safely bet on there being other wake ups that aren't remembered also.

Did you read about sleep architecture in the alcohol question thread?
https://www.thesleepdoctor.com/2017/11/ ... hol-sleep/
Disregard the part about the alcohol and just read on how important good solid sleep architecture is in terms of restorative sleep.
Doesn't matter if it is alcohol or the wife or the cat or the dog or thunder or the neighbors....you mess with sleep architecture you feel like crap.

I have 2 main things that mess with my sleep architecture (or what I often refer to as quality).
Pain and an aging dog with bladder issues....and I am a light sleeper.
I get some pretty awesome looking reports but feel like total crap quite often. The machine can only do so much to make us feel better and there comes a time when we have to look at other factors.

Maybe you have reached that time.
This is when the hard work really starts though. It's not nearly as easily as just using the software report as a guide on what to do.
You've been here long enough and read my usual responses to people who aren't feeling the good numbers they are getting.
Sounds like one of your problems is sleep maintenance insomnia...so time to start digging into potential culprits and the list is a mile long of suspects.

[zonker]

[quote=Pugsy post_id=1274164 time=1541084346 user_id=40932
<snip>
Maybe you have reached that time.
This is when the hard work really starts though. It's not nearly as easily as just using the software report as a guide on what to do.
You've been here long enough and read my usual responses to people who aren't feeling the good numbers they are getting.
Sounds like one of your problems is sleep maintenance insomnia...so time to start digging into potential culprits and the list is a mile long of suspects.
[/quote]

yikes! as per usual, you've given a thoughtful reply. and i won't disgrace it with a flip response.

will give the link a read.

thanks!

[nicholasjh1]

feeling poorly through it all.
.
.
i slept my typical sleep pattern of about an hour at a time.

Think these could be related? I didn't know about this hour at a time sleep pattern. Also don't know where to go with trying to help. Maybe Pugsy will be along to give you her "sleep detective interrogation".

but i decided to bump my minimum to 11. not a good move, as it turned out. i stuck with as long as i could, but eventually i turned it back down to ten. i couldn't tolerate the pressure.

This same thing happened to me when I tried to jump straight from 10 to 12 min pressure. Strange breathing pattern, would end up getting light headed. That's when I started moving up in small increments at weekly intervals, made it easy for me. YMMV.

to the point about awaking each hour and feeling poorly; no. my sleep pattern has, for the last three years, been asleep for maybe the 1st hour and a half, then about every hour. truth to tell, i don't even remember if i did that before i was on a machine or not.

have brought that up before, but have been told that "everyone wakes up throughout the night" and that i should just "roll over and go back to sleep". i seem to remember being told that i would get over it and not notice anymore.

still waiting for that to happen.

THAT"S what i was trying to say-light headed! i kept thinking "fizzy" or some such, which didn't quite describe it. thanks for that. also, thanks for the recommendation to bump it up slowly. that's been said before, but i haven't tried it yet with THIS machine under the "not-for-her" setting.

maybe will give it a go tonight.

20mg of noopept a day in the morning seems to have fixed this for me. It's an alpha wave inducer, and also helps to repair the brain. I think the brain damage from apnea may make it harder to get into alpha wave state, which would be like a semi lucid dreaming state.... normally when you "wake" from sleep you're in this state, and if you stay in it you can go back to sleep. After being on noopept for around 3 weeks my sleep started becoming less and less fragmented. Now I sleep 5-8 hours before "waking"

[zonker]

Did you read about sleep architecture in the alcohol question thread?
https://www.thesleepdoctor.com/2017/11/ ... hol-sleep/
Disregard the part about the alcohol and just read on how important good solid sleep architecture is in terms of restorative sleep.
Doesn't matter if it is alcohol or the wife or the cat or the dog or thunder or the neighbors....you mess with sleep architecture you feel like crap.

OH.MY.GOD. !!!!

thank you very much for this link. here's the part i'm quoting and responding to-

"How alcohol affects sleep
Before we look at the effects of alcohol on sleep in detail, here’s the basic bottom line. The more you drink, and the closer your drinking is to bedtime, the more it will negatively impact your sleep. Even moderate amounts of alcohol in your system at bedtime alters sleep architecture—the natural flow of sleep through different stages. It also leads to lighter, more restless sleep as the night wears on, diminished sleep quality, and next-day fatigue.

What does drinking alcohol do to a night of sleep?
It’s true, sleep may happen more quickly after consuming a drink or two. Alcohol often does reduce sleep onset latency—the time it takes to fall asleep. Depending on how much alcohol is consumed, however, what seems like falling asleep may be something closer to passing out. And we quickly build a tolerance for the sedative effects of alcohol, which means you may need to drink more to have the same initial sleep-inducing effects.

For many people who drink moderately, falling asleep more quickly may seem like an advantage of a nightly glass of wine. But alcohol goes on to affect the entire night of sleep to come.

In the first half of the night, when the body is metabolizing alcohol, studies show people spend more time in deep, slow-wave sleep and less time in REM sleep. It may sound like a good idea to spend more time in deep sleep. Not so fast. Sleep architecture is biologically driven and finely calibrated to meet the body’s needs during nightly rest—changes to the natural, typical structure of sleep aren’t generally good for health or well being. REM sleep, which gets shortchanged in the first half of the night under the influence of alcohol, is important for mental restoration, including memory and emotional processing.

During the second half of the night, sleep becomes more actively disrupted. As alcohol is metabolized and any of its sedative effects dissipate, the body undergoes what scientists call a “rebound effect.” This includes a move from deeper to lighter sleep, with more frequent awakenings during the second half of the night. (These may be micro-awakenings that the sleeper doesn’t even remember—but they still interrupt the flow, and quality, of sleep.) During the second half of the night, sleep architecture shifts again away from normal, with less time spent in slow wave sleep. The rebound effect may include more time in REM—a lighter sleep stage from which it is easy to be awakened.

People who go to bed with alcohol in their system may be more likely to wake early in the morning and not be able to fall back to sleep, another consequence of the rebound effect."

this is me. this describes what i'm going through. i should NOT disregard the part about alcohol. it's spot on.

i like a glass of wine with dinner. i like a glass of wine after dinner. and so on and so forth. before you know it, i've drunk 3-4 glasses with that last one being about 2-3 hours before lights out.

it sure looks like, from what i'm reading, that it would help to cut that WAY back or cut it out altogether. the author says something about drinking only 2x a week or so. but if i can just first get it back to one glass, i'm sure it will be beneficial. hell, even if it doesn't remove my sleep problems, it will certainly be helpful in other ways.

again, thanks!

[zonker]

20mg of noopept a day in the morning seems to have fixed this for me. It's an alpha wave inducer, and also helps to repair the brain. I think the brain damage from apnea may make it harder to get into alpha wave state, which would be like a semi lucid dreaming state.... normally when you "wake" from sleep you're in this state, and if you stay in it you can go back to sleep. After being on noopept for around 3 weeks my sleep started becoming less and less fragmented. Now I sleep 5-8 hours before "waking"

thanks for that, nicholas! i will put that in my back pocket and give it a try. but first, i'm going with less alcohol route.

btw, what brand do you take?

[mongoosehardy]

need help from you all in interpreting my sleepyhead graphs. i started out ignorant about sleepyhead and lo, three years later, i'm still fairly ignorant.

what i'm going to display here is seven nights of info. the only chart missing in order to make these "in a row" is 9-29. no data for that night as ii DID insert the data card, but didn't engage it fully into the slot.

now that i've been on my airsense 10 autoset for her machine for about two months, i feel that i should have the settings down pat. however, due to one week of out of town guests (translating as stuffing myself silly at dinner, etc.) and one week of back pain, i kept having to juggle settings to try to get good numbers and a good night of sleep.

one of the things i'm trying to do is utilize epr. this has not worked for me in the past. but i was more determined to try to make it work with my new machine. and i've had some success. i don't have huge bouts of aerophagia on a setting of 1. if i start pushing up, though, it will still increase with an increase in minimum pressure, until i reach a setting of 3, which is just to tolerable for me. despite what epr is meant to do, it still seams opposite for me.

there are more charts where i've played with epr and minimum settings. these are just what i've captured to show here-

1st up, min 8.8 epr 2
screenshot-9-25-18.png

next min 8.8 epr 2
screenshot-9-26-18.png

next min 8.8 epr 3
screenshot-9-27-18.png

seems i can only get three images here, so will try more in the next post!

Your attachment are good.

[zonker]

for the last two nights, i've consumed only one glass of wine. the benefits were immediate in that for the last two mornings, i've woke up without the muscle aches or headaches! so there is some good news right there!

it has had no positive effect on fragmented sleep, AS YET. my feeling is that this may take a bit more time. also, i fully realize that the article pugsy linked talked about cutting out alcohol altogether. well, maybe once or twice a week, you could have a glass or two. but i want to try this one glass thing first and see if it will eventually improve the fragmentation.

while that is all good news, i also realize that it's a "distraction" as the political pundits have been saying for decades. i don't know if this will tie in with nice low numbers without aerophagia or not. in any event, i'm not going to post any graphs for a while. maybe give it a week to settle in without any further fiddling.

this is all going to take more patience than i usually have, so we'll se how it goes.

[Pugsy]

this is all going to take more patience than i usually have,

It's why you see me say "getting the good numbers is the easy part".....feeling those good numbers is sometimes where the real work comes in.
Unfortunately most of us have other things in our lives that impact how we sleep and feel. Fact of life really.
Sometimes little things that we don't really think about much or realize exactly how much it might factor into our sleep or daytime feelings are on the sidelines messing with us.
That's why I say this type of detective work is the hardest work.

Not everything is about sleep apnea and thus the cpap machine can't fix everything. We often wish it would because we like the easy way instead of the hard work way of fixing problems.

[zonker]

this is all going to take more patience than i usually have,

It's why you see me say "getting the good numbers is the easy part".....feeling those good numbers is sometimes where the real work comes in.
Unfortunately most of us have other things in our lives that impact how we sleep and feel. Fact of life really.

ezgif.com-resize (3).gif

[nicholasjh1]

20mg of noopept a day in the morning seems to have fixed this for me. It's an alpha wave inducer, and also helps to repair the brain. I think the brain damage from apnea may make it harder to get into alpha wave state, which would be like a semi lucid dreaming state.... normally when you "wake" from sleep you're in this state, and if you stay in it you can go back to sleep. After being on noopept for around 3 weeks my sleep started becoming less and less fragmented. Now I sleep 5-8 hours before "waking"

thanks for that, nicholas! i will put that in my back pocket and give it a try. but first, i'm going with less alcohol route.

btw, what brand do you take?

Cognitive Nutrition NeuroPEPT. It should be noted that the dosing is finnicky by individual, but the 20mg seems to work for me luckily because apparently it's very bitter. Because of the dosing issue it is available in a powdered form for messing with measuring. Sometimes a lower dose is more effective with this (as with many vitamins and drugs from studies I've read, it turns out that if you take too much of something the body adjusts to counteract it under certain circumstances making that substance ineffective (tolerance essentially, but at some doses tolerance doesn't build much or at all)).

[zonker]

Cognitive Nutrition NeuroPEPT. It should be noted that the dosing is finnicky by individual, but the 20mg seems to work for me luckily because apparently it's very bitter. Because of the dosing issue it is available in a powdered form for messing with measuring. Sometimes a lower dose is more effective with this (as with many vitamins and drugs from studies I've read, it turns out that if you take too much of something the body adjusts to counteract it under certain circumstances making that substance ineffective (tolerance essentially, but at some doses tolerance doesn't build much or at all)).

thanks for that!

[zonker]

okay, it's been awhile since i've posted any charts and i may not on this post either. we'll see how it goes after i gas at you for awhile.

as the title of this post suggests, my concern was with the variances in my ahi i'd see from one night to the other. in my original post. i showed charts anywhere from ahi of 6.12 to 1.13! i was hoping to get some help in that and, indeed, you guys came through.

djams suggested i try using the straight apap and quit using the "for her" mode. thanks, guy, that helped!

palerider suggested i take this VERY SLOWLY and up my minimum just a very small amount and let it play out. thank you, sir. i just bumped my min last night. after about 10 days of staying at 9.6 i bumped last night to 9.8 with no ill effects.

and then as many conversations here tend to do, we drifted into my fragmented sleep. this is something i've dealt with for my entire time on apap. just thought it was part and parcel and that i'd just live with it. BUT, pugsy found an article she read and posted a link here. and it really did the trick!

since cutting my wine consumption to one(ish) per day, my nasty headaches have abated. i can still get a slight one now and then, but they are nothing compared to what i had. also, i no longer feel like i've been beat to hell by some pro boxer or something. lastly, my sleep fragments are lessening by quite a bit. instead of waking up every hour, i can now go to 3 or 4 hours without waking! granted, i may still be waking up every hour, but i mean to say that i don't remember it.

yay!

jas_williams mentioned in another thread that the poster might want to look at their averages in the statistics of sleepyhead. that reminded me that i hadn't looked in some time. and i was pleasantly surprised. my ahi over the last three months has gone from avg of 2.16 to 1.23. that certainly made me feel better.

yeah, think i WILL post two graphs because i think they underline what palerider and pugsy have said.

screenshot-11-2-18.png

despite this being an ahi of 2.17, i slept for five hours without being conscious of waking up. and when i did, i rolled over and slept for another three hours!!

yet on the other hand-

screenshot-11-7-18.png

despite a mighty fine ahi of .57, i slept horribly. i was back in that waking up every hour mode. i MAY have had a bit more wine that night. (i'm not telling!)

so in the end, it looks like i need to just ignore those numbers and cut down on the wine. and if it doesn't go like i want, i can always take nicholas' suggestion and take those supplements.

[palerider]

djams suggested i try using the straight apap and quit using the "for her" mode. thanks, guy, that helped!

palerider suggested i take this VERY SLOWLY and up my minimum just a very small amount and let it play out. thank you, sir. i just bumped my min last night. after about 10 days of staying at 9.6 i bumped last night to 9.8 with no ill effects.

djams had a great idea about that.. and I think that you should keep sneaking the pressure up, you're still spending most, if not all the night above the minimum, and ideally, you want the minimum to be high enough that you spend some of the night there, instead of the constant up and down. If it weren't for the bloating you've had, I'd say bump your min to 11. However, with the bloating, I think that sneaking up on it is better, letting you get used to the higher pressures over time, till they don't bother you.