Horrible night last night! Half full balloon feeling?

Been on my CPAP for about 7 months now. I've been dialing in my pressure settings and I'm stable with an average AHI of 3, at my 7 to 12 pressure. I've been running those settings fine for the past 2 weeks, and before that I was at a 8 to 15 and was mostly fine for a month+.

I'm using the nose pillows with the P10 headgear.

I went to bed last night at a decent hour with no changes in anything. Same pillow, same bed, same level of tiredness, same heat/humidity on the machine and in the room. Hose was fine, headgear was fine, nose pillows were fine, the inside cone wasn't messed up, machine had water in it. Literally just another night that is no different from the weeks before. I made it about 90 minutes before waking up feeling like a half-full balloon. Looking at my Resmed 11 it said my pressure was fluctuating between 8 and 10, which is normal for me.

The best way to describe it is a half-full balloon. When I exhaled, it felt as if I can only get rid of 50% of the air in my lungs. Then when I inhale, my lungs just fill right back up to an uncomfortable 99.9% capacity. I never felt that "relief" from a full exhale, it just kept feeling like I was cramming more and more air into my already inflated lungs. I had to keep opening my mouth to gasp out and relieve the pressure and exhale with an open mouth to get rid of that extra 50% air and get a full "breathe-out" feeling.

I laid there for at least and hour trying to figure out what it could be, tried controlling my breathing, got rid of all the blankets, tried different sleeping positions, all trying to figure out why I was having such a hard time "pushing" out the air from my lungs. Eventually I got up and installed my N10 Nasal mask and was able to fall back asleep because it does not give me the same half-full feeling that the P10 did. I don't want to use the N10 permanently, because when I wear it I have many more mask offs, no matter what I set the humidity and temperature to I always get rainouts and wake up with a wet nose, and a higher AHI with it.

Any idea what could be happening? I prefer the P10 and have been using it for months, so I don't know why I suddenly had that "full" feeling using it last night. I'd also like to learn if that feeling I'm describing has a proper term so I can better explain it!

If you couldn't breathe out properly with nasal pillows, and had it easier with an N10 - could it be you were suffering from nasal congestion, aggravated by the mechanical impact of the air from the P10?

How long have you used the current pair of pillows?
Remember, everyone is different.
Some can use the same pair for months--but not everyone.

This particular set of nose pillows is new-ish, got them from my medical supply company about 3 weeks ago.

No nasal congestion either.

Woke up this morning at 4AM with the same problem. On a whim I reduced the Humidity from 4 to a 1, and it seemed to help, somehow. Any ideas why this could be the case?