Apneas Whilst TRYING to sleep/wakefulness

idlewire wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 28, 2019 1:28 pm

I would put to the side the replies telling you to ignore this or that it's the result of stress or anxiety. As far as I know, anxiety does not cause you to unconsciously stop breathing and your oxygen to drop when you fall asleep.

He never mentioned oxygen desats.

I know, but likely he hasn't checked. So I meant if he checks and that is the case. I'm encouraging him to explore this further because when this started happening to me, I did indeed write it off as anxiety. When I got a pulse oximeter, I saw that my O2 was sometimes hitting the low 80s. When I finally got a CPAP and was able to look at the data, I could see I was holding my breath for long periods of time. I was not even conscious of this time passing that I was holding my breath - to me it seemed like I was jolting awake immediately upon drifting off.

idlewire wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 28, 2019 2:52 pm

I could see I was holding my breath for long periods of time.

What do you consider a "long period"?

I only jolted at the end of this, oblivious that 100 seconds had elapsed. Now obviously there are some breaths in this one, but it's not uncommon for me to have CAs lasting 20-30 seconds.

I have heard this asked before, when your awake, you control a lot of the aspects of your breathing. When you sleep your only mechanism for breathing is your medulla oblongata, it measures the carbon dioxide in your blood and in return tells your body to inhale/ breath. There can be a slight lag in some people when transitioning between awake/ asleep.