What am I doing wrong ?

General Discussion on any topic relating to CPAP and/or Sleep Apnea.
BlizzardUK
Posts: 77
Joined: Tue Aug 18, 2015 4:20 pm

What am I doing wrong ?

Post by BlizzardUK » Thu Mar 18, 2021 8:39 pm

Back in 2015 because I had put on an incredible amount of weight I suddenly developed sleep apnea to the point I couldn't stay awake during the day. I had a sleep test and was told I had the worst sleep apnea the clinician had seen. So I got myself a pre-owned Auto CPAP machine and managed to lower my AHI to under 5 and I felt great, my crazy dreams had stopped and all was good. When I lost a lot of weight I found I no longer needed the machine. However 5 years later I started to re-gain weight and found myself starting to get tired in the day again. I didn't re-start on the machine as I thought that would be admitting defeat and I wanted an extra reason to lose the weight. However, sadly I do need the machine again as I am really feeling it again. This time round however I still feel tired even though my AHI is under 4 each night. I am also still having vivid dreams. Is there anything about my below graph that shows what I may need to do ? Should I adjust the pressure ?

BTW, I sleep during the day, in case curious about the sleep times shown on the photos.

Thanks all.
sleep.png
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Pugsy
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Re: What am I doing wrong ?

Post by Pugsy » Thu Mar 18, 2021 10:21 pm

When you remember a lot of dreams it means you are waking often during the night....not a good thing for sure.
We only remember dreams when we wake up either during or right at the end of a dream long enough to form a memory.
We can dream in any sleep stage....it's not limited to REM.
So essentially really crappy sleep quality for some reason equals feeling crappy during the day.

Off hand the one thing that stands out on this report is you are hitting your max pressure of 11 cm quite often and sometimes staying there...the machine wants to go higher and fight something but it can't. That something could be related to airway issues and affecting your sleep quality and causing wake ups.

First thing I would do is increase the maximum and let the machine try to sort things out.

If that doesn't help then I would start digging into other potential reasons for poor sleep quality.
When we wake often during the night it's called sleep maintenance insomnia...so google it and see that really long list of potential culprits....sleep apnea is on that list but there's also a lot more culprits on the list.

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