First 0.0 AHI = worst night's sleep of my life

[Black Shampoo]

Well, that was unexpected.

I finally got a 0.0 AHI after six months of monitoring my data and using an S9 Autoset w/ tweaking pressure ranges - and last night is one of those "worst night's sleep" ever. I made the mistake of having caffeine in the evening (around 8'ish...peer pressure!) when I normally don't have any after noon, and I drank a lot of water because I've been feeling dehydrated, and I'm stressed out of my mind over some stuff going on in my life.

It was one of those nights where I felt like I never really got into a deep sleep...and I wake up to my first 0.0 AHI. The previous night I had a 0.2, which was my previous record. I usually am lucky to get under a 2.0

So I started thinking - I wonder if I didn't sleep deep enough to actually get into some of the obstructives that I normally would? Does that make sense, that lighter sleep = the central nervous system and etc. not "lettin go" enough to get into the traditional symptoms?

[zoocrewphoto]

It makes complete sense. Many people have more events during deeper sleep and REM sleep. If you never went through the cycles and got into those levels, then you may not have had much opportunity for events.

[SleepyBobR]

Yes. Makes perfect sense. If you lie in bed all night wide awake with your mask on you'll probably have a zero AHI.

[Black Shampoo]

Thanks for the feedback. I've been tweaking some other stuff about my setup and slept incredibly deeply the night I had the 0.2, so the tweaks are probably working.

[LSAT]

Yes. Makes perfect sense. If you lie in bed all night wide awake with your mask on you'll probably have a zero AHI.

I think that if this happened, you would end up with lots of Centrals

[robysue]

Yes. Makes perfect sense. If you lie in bed all night wide awake with your mask on you'll probably have a zero AHI.

I think that if this happened, you would end up with lots of Centrals

It really depends on just how ragged your normal wake breathing is. Some people get a lot of "fake centrals" scored when using the mask while wide awake. Others don't.

Me? For some strange reason, when I'm wide awake with my mask on, Kaa is just as likely to score an "obviously false" event as an OA or an H as he is to score it as a CA.

Here are some examples from Dec 1. We had just driven back to Buffalo from Central NJ and got back home about 2:00AM. I was full caffeinated and wired from doing the last two hours of the drive. I went to bed around 2:30 after taking an Ambien. (Kaa's timestamp is 21 minutes too fast. I know I can fix this in SH, but I want the data in Encore and SH to have the same time stamps.) Here's the overview of the whole night:



I had real trouble falling asleep in spite of the Ambien. That big whole in the data? I was out of bed and extremely angry and upset over the fact that I just could not seem to get comfortable. Every time I started to kind of drift off, something about the air started tickling the back of the throat AND making me wake back up---as in wide awake and very uncomfortable. As you can see, Kaa scored an OA about 3:10 (Kaa time), which is about 15-20 minute after I first went to bed. I literally exploded with anger about 3:30. What you can't see in this shot is that I'd already turned Kaa off and on at 3:18, 3:22, and 3:38. If I was asleep for that OA, it must have been just a bare micro nap type sleep.

At the other end of the night, I was restless after the alarm clock went off at 7:45 (Kaa time) and I didn't want to get up. Shortly after turning the alarm off and while trying to get back to sleep or while drifting in and out of sleep, Kaa scored 3 Hs. Here's a close up of them:



The break in the wave flow just before these hyponeas is where I turned Kaa off and on right after turning the alarm clock off. I'm pretty sure the first two Hs are some kind of "transition to sleep" event that occurred as I was trying to get back to sleep. Would they have been scored on a sleep test? I really don't know, but it's clear they might NOT have been scored because it's just as likely that I was awake as asleep here. That third H? I may have still been tossing and turning trying to get back to sleep or I may have actually dropped back off by then.

But in fact, it's not at all clear how much sleep I actually got after the alarm went off. I felt like I got some sleep, but that last hour in bed was pretty restless:



In addition to the three H's shortly after the alarm clock break, there's a set of 4 CAs and one OA scored between 8:20 and 8:30. Are they real? Again I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. All I know is that I was not very soundly asleep during this whole period. And then I finally get fed up enough to get out of bed (or maybe Hubby tells me he has some coffee ready), but just before I turn Kaa off for good, when I know I was lying in bed NOT wanting to get up for awhile and NOT able to get back to sleep here's what got scored:



One more CA followed by 4 more OAs that are highly unlikely to be "real" events in my opinion simply because I'm pretty sure I was awake when they happened.

Overall, there were 10 OAs scored on this night. I'm pretty sure that 6 of them occurred when I know I was awake or very, very restless. Of the other four? I have some reason to believe that one more of them may have occurred as post arousal event where the arousal was probably not triggered by OSA events, FL, or snoring. Kaa scored 5 CAs this night, and all of them were scored during that long restless period after the alarm clock went off. All 3 of the Hs scored that night were in this long restless period.

So out of a total of 18 events (CAs, OAs, and Hs) scored during this miserable night, 1 was scored before I fell asleep and 13 were scored during the time I was lying in bed "dosing" after the alarm went off. So a total of 14 of the 18 events are events that quite likely occurred while I was awake, and of those 14 probably "false" events? 6 are OAs, 5 are CAs, and 3 are Hs.