Sleepyv wrote:I feel drowsily like I never can quite wake up. I wake up after about 6 hrs of sleep and get up to go to bathroom and leave it of.
Do you go back to sleep without the mask on? If so, how long do you sleep without the mask?
If I use it more than that I feel worse.
Please be more specific: In what sense do you feel worse if you use the mask for more than 6 hours?
Do you wake up with a dry throat? Sore nose? Air in the stomach?
Or are you just more tired after getting an hour or two more of sleep with the CPAP on your face that you are if you just get up with 6 hours of sleep?
I feel like I never go into a deep sleep. I don't guess Sleepyhead will show that.
Your machine cannot track what sleep stage you are in. So SH data cannot definitively show how much Stage I, II, III or REM sleep you get each night.
Why do you think you never get into a "deep sleep"? And what do you mean by "deep sleep"? Do you mean REM? Or do you mean Stage III (slow wave sleep)? Most people get the bulk of their Stage III sleep during the first two or three full sleep cycles during the night. Most people get the bulk of their REM sleep during the last two or three sleep cycles during the night.
If you are sleeping only six hours, you are probably only getting 4 full sleep cycles. You may need 7.5 hours of sleep to feel better.
I do have anxiety after I've had a really bad night on my cpap because I think It should be working better by now.
Define what you mean by a "really bad night on your cpap" please. Do you mean the AHI is higher than you want? (How high is "too high"?) Or do you mean you remember tossing and turning all night long and not getting very much sleep in spite of using the CPAP? Or something else?
Some days I feel ok but have more days I feel like a zombi
It's important to NOT let the data drive how you feel.
What I mean by that is this: Some people look at the AHI data as soon as they get up each morning. And if they see an AHI that is higher than they want it to be, they immediately start thinking to themselves, "The AHI is way too high, so it was a bad night for the CPAP, and I'm going to feel it today." And that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: In other words, as the day goes on, the anxiety induced by knowing the AHI was above 3.0 is magnified by every little normal bump during the day: You get tired and you blame it on the AHI instead of the fact that you had a very stressful morning at work. You can't concentrate on something, and you blame the concentration problems on the AHI instead of just the usual day-to-day stress affecting your ability to concentrate. And so and so forth.
Since you feel "ok" some days, but you feel like a zombi on other days, it may be time to keep a log. I'd suggest not looking at the AHI data until the
end of the day for a couple of weeks however. That way you'll know the "ok" days and the "zombi" days are not being influenced by your
knowledge of what the AHI was the night before.
You could keep the log either on paper or in an Excel spreadsheet. It doesn't need to be complicated. Just track a few things that you know make you feel better or worse each day. One variable can be "Feel like a zombi". After a couple of weeks of data, you will have a better idea as to whether there is any correlation between the CPAP data and the "feel like a zombi" data. You may also have some data that shows you the relative proportion of "ok" days to "zombi" days is higher than you expect. CPAP is a journey, and one of the early indicators that it is doing some positive good is that the number of "ok" days starts to catch up to the number of "zombi" days. Eventually the "ok" days start to out number the number of "zombi" days. At first, they may not outnumber them by much. But with time, the "zombi" days should become much rarer, even if they never disappear completely.