Pugsy wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 6:09 pm
Needing to pee often during the night (official medical term is nocturia) is a common symptom of sleep apnea.
I had it myself and it was the first symptom to go away with effective treatment. I always said that even if nothing else got better that the no more peeing every hour on the hour was well worth it.
Now of course there are other reasons that people might have nocturia issues...over active bladder for male or females as well as for the guys that are a bit older the old prostate causing problems is another.
Then there's the "habit" thing....people get used to waking up needing to pee and once the sleep apnea takes care of the nocturia the people may have developed the "habit"....you know wake up for some reason and decide "I am awake so I might as well go pee" but maybe the bladder isn't full. I know when I had it prior to starting cpap....my bladder was painfully full causing the wake up. Big difference between having to pee and just "I might as well go pee".
Your OSA is much worse on your back and if you need to sleep on your back we may need to re-evaluate the pressure settings but for now just sleep in any position that you can sleep in and don't worry about it.
Your main priority right now is to decrease the wake ups. If at all possible try to figure out what might be causing them.
Now it is normal to wake up after the end of a REM sleep stage cycle but most of the time we aren't awake very long and don't have a memory of the awakening....but if you do wake up 2 or 3 times a night....it could be REM related and we just accept it. What we don't want to go doing is starting more sleep problems by worrying about waking up.
The lack of dreaming...doesn't mean much really.
We can dream in any sleep stage and not just in REM and not remembering them doesn't mean they didn't happen.
All it means is you didn't wake up during the dream which is actually a good thing. We want to keep the wake ups at a minimum.
Also...sometimes we just wake up and don't really know why and can't find anything comfortwise that we can maybe blame the wake up on. Sometimes it's just the newness of it all and the brain wanting to alert its human that there is an alien plastered on the face and blowing air up the nose. I had this happen to me for at least 3 months when I started therapy.
I was happy with the mask and the therapy and doing very well but I still would have these wake ups 8 to 10 times that I couldn't figure out why except my mind seemed to be on the therapy. Once I got used to the pressures a lot of times I would wake up wondering if the machine was on because I didn't notice the pressure anymore.
Eventually the brain does adjust and comes to see that alien as its human's new best friend.
There is a lot of truth to the old adage of "give it time" as well. Time for the body and brain to adjust to the new way of doing things. This is why once we get settings that give us decent results that we say to just keep those settings for a while and lets see how things go. Don't go changing things without a really good reason. Give the body and brain a chance to adjust. I like to have at least a weeks worth of data without any changes before I consider changing anything unless there is a huge problem with a new setting.
I am reasonably certain some of your central apneas are related to arousal/awake breathing false positives but I can't say for sure that the majority are. There are people who have centrals pop up just from starting cpap therapy. I don't know yet if you fall into that category or not. It's about 10% of the people who start cpap that end up having this happen.
Sometimes if it does happen the centrals will fade away on their own....sometimes people need a different machine.
So for you...we don't know for sure how many of the centrals are the real deal and even if the bulk were real....the most common thing done about them is to sit back and just watch them because sometimes they will go away on their own.
In the meantime you learn how to identify real vs awake centrals.
So...work on sleep quality itself. Continue the on/off button thing so we know for sure when awake times are happening...and do whatever it takes for you to get to sleep and stay asleep.
Google "good sleep hygiene habits" and see if there is something you are doing that can be improved upon to facilitate sleep.
If you can safely take some sort of OTC sleep aid...try it and see if it helps or not.
We need a night with maybe only 2 or 3 wake ups to best evaluate your pressure needs as well as those centrals.
3 or 4 hours of solid sleep would be a big help.
Don't obsess over it though. There are 2 kinds of insomnia...sleep onset insomnia which is trouble falling asleep and sleep maintenance insomnia which is where we wake up too many times during the night or wake up and can't go back to sleep which sort of turns into sleep onset insomnia. The insomnia monster feeds on worry though. So try not to worry about it because most of the time it just makes things worse.
You are reporting feeling better though...which is another reason I tend to think those centrals are arousal related.
If they were the real deal asleep centrals I think with that many we are seeing that you would feel like total crap...and not feeling better.
Your assigned homework....read up on good sleep hygiene....work on identifying real vs awake/arousal centrals...and just get some sleep any way you can.
many thanks