Deep Breathes when starting therapy at night?

Why do I always take really deep breathes at night when starting therapy? Does that mean that the pressure is too low? If I raise the pressure, I find it harder to breathe as well. Is this just normal until our airways fill up?

The most likely reason for those big, deep breaths at the beginning of the night is that you are still awake and you are settling down getting ready to sleep. Deep breathing is relaxing for many people (think yoga breathing), and many of us do this without realizing it as we are settling down getting ready to actually go to sleep.

There's nothing wrong with your breathing at the beginning of your therapy. And if you are comfortable breathing at a pressure of 7cm, there's no good reason to increase it based on what you are doing while you are still settling down and getting ready to go to sleep.

On the other hand, if you feel like you are struggling to breathe at 7cm, it may make you feel better if you bumped up the min pressure 8cm.

Transitioning from wake to sleep is sort of like switching gears in a vehicle with an older manual transmission. Some of us do it very smoothly, but most of us can have some occasional harmless pauses and gasps and sighs and lurches as we switch from wake breathing to sleep breathing. Those transitions do not get scored as anything meaningful in lab sleep studies.

I find the deep breathing to be very relaxing. It also makes it very easy to see when I actually fall asleep. I immediately go from deep breaths to shallower breaths.