Need sleeping pill suggestion to stop waking up

[torontoCPAPguy]

Avi - I disagree with your promotion of benzos & Ambien. Ambien crosses the blood-brain barrier and can have all kinds of weird side effects. My mother-in-law takes Ambien & at night, the side effects are definitely WEIRD, she gets up, washes dishes, cleans the fridge, mops the bathroom floor, all kinds of stuff & she remembers NONE of it. I have witnessed this firsthand. Although this is just my opinion, I just think suggesting that someone should get hooked on benzos for something like this is unnessary, and I'm not big on using Ambien, for reasons stated & google that if you don't believe me. As for your link to that website, you are a dirty old man.

Cosmo, I posted my remarks to you in the prior post.

Jen

Need to get some for my wife and kids; where can I get some?

[torontoCPAPguy]

It would be good to try and stick to the topic of the thread.
Rude, Inflammatory, denegrating, pornographic, etc. posts require a moderator assisted suspension and if repeated a moderator assisted expulsion.

This board has been free and open for as long as I can remember. It would be nice to keep it that way. PLEASE do not take the bait and get into a heated discussion.

[cosmo]

I stuck with the Diphenhydramine (Benadryl) based sleeping pill for almost a week. Its been useless for keeping me asleep. I still wake over 4 times a night.

AHI numbers have been good and it has not affected my breathing. Probably due to it being an antihistamine and opening my sinuses at night when I sleep. I will try different allergy pills.

Diphenhydramine has made me tired throughout the day. I will be testing different sleeping pills in the future.

[tetragon]

Cosmo, most sleeping pills are aimed towards sleep onset insomnia. That is when people have difficulties with falling asleep at the beginning of the night. What you have decided you have a problem with is sleep maintenance, not sleep onset. The pills that are occasionally used for sleep maintenance insomnia can be less pleasant to work with, due to a higher risk of problems the next day. This is because a therapeutic level of the drug needs to be maintained longer than when only dealing with sleep onset.

[avi123]

I stuck with the Diphenhydramine (Benadryl) based sleeping pill for almost a week. Its been useless for keeping me asleep. I still wake over 4 times a night.

AHI numbers have been good and it has not affected my breathing. Probably due to it being an antihistamine and opening my sinuses at night when I sleep. I will try different allergy pills.

Diphenhydramine has made me tired throughout the day. I will be testing different sleeping pills in the future.

Comment,

Cosmo, last night I reduced the dose of the Zolpidem that I take, only at bedtime, to 2.5 mg and slept well with no wake ups. This dose
is LESS than recommended by physicians. So it's possible that it was a placebo effect. Who knows?

See my results:








Tonight, I am going to jack- up the maximum pressure on the APAP by 0.5 cm so that the pressure graph would not "kiss" the upper pressure limit line in the graph.
As to the leak at 8:30, I bet it's b/c of overused mask cushion. Today, I ordered new cushions as replacements under Medicare.
As to "antihistamine and opening my sinuses" I take Claritin but not often. If the stuff in my nose is liquidy I then use Bounty type paper towel pieces to clear my nose COMPLETELY. Especially after placing the mask and starting the machine. I need to repeat this procedure about 3 times, i.e. shutting the machine and blowing my nose.

I am convinced that I suffer from Vasomotor Rhinitis in which case the changes of air flow and its temperatures make my nose stuffy. It's not allergic rhinitis.

[patrissimo]

If there was something that actually helped you wake up less w/o side effects, it would be the best selling drug in the world! There is nothing like that for long-term use, let alone OTC. There are sleeping pills that will help you wake up less, but they have various of these downsides:

1) negatively impact your sleep architecture (benzos, diphenhydramine)
2) make apnea worse (muscle relaxants, respiratory depressants)
3) addiction & tolerance (benzos especially, but everything really)
4) morning hangover (anything w/ a long half-life)

I'd say the drug with the least combination of these is probably Ambien: it's not a respiratory depressant (2), it supposedly has minimal impact on sleep architecture (1) (although I don't buy it b/c it gives me awful sleep), it's much less addicting than benzos, and the short half-life means it's out by morning. You might need an XR to sleep through the night, or you could take it the first time you wake up.

One thing to understand is that the way our body breaks down drugs makes it impossible to have something that keeps you down all night & doesn't have a morning hangover (unless you're on an IV!). If the half-life is 4 hours, then in 4 hours it is at 50%, at 8 hours 25%, at 12 hours 12.5%. If it's strong enough to keep you asleep in hours 6, 7, 8, then it's strong enough to give you a hangover when you wake up. It's possible that an extended release (XR) technology encasing a drug w/ really short half-life (like Sonata, but ideally even shorter) could get around this, but not a basic pill.

Anticholinergics like benadryl cause cognitive impairment: http://phys.org/news198238000.html