sleepyzzzz,
You wrote way back before all the screenshots:
sleepyzzzz wrote: ↑Thu Mar 09, 2023 4:30 pm
What is my problem and why I am trying to tweak such low AHI ?
The more arousals I have in my sleep ( conscious arousals where I'm aware of my surrounding and have time to stop/restart the machine to mark an arousal and remember my dream, then go back to sleep; the more arousals I get, the worse my sleep is, which leads me to wake up as "zombie" can not do anything other than trying to go back to bed and hope I could fall asleep for a nap even a minute ( I can not nap, I am awaken with almost snore like airflow limitation as soon as I drift to sleep), if that happens, the zombie effect subsids for few hours before returning, nothing can fix it till it is sleep time and I try another night.
I've given cursory looks that the very large number of screen shots that you've posted. Yes, there do appear to be some
spontaneous arousals---i.e. arousals that do not appear to be respiratory related. And excess numbers of spontaneous arousals can easily lead to the zombie feeling the next day. But dial-wingin' isn't going to fix spontaneous arousals or much improve your sleep when your
treated AHI is as low as it is in the screenshots you've shown us.
In other words, all the surgeries and your current use of CPAP is keeping your sleep disrupted breathing under control so that SDB (i.e. OSA and UARS and snoring) is NOT what is causing your
bad sleep. Something else is causing the bad sleep and until you address whatever the something else is, your sleep is likely to remain
bad.
And you've admitted that you find yourself in a feedback loop: When you arouse enough to be aware that you've aroused, that leads to more and more arousals. In other words, you're dealing with sleep continuity insomnia of some sort. And my guess is that what's feeding the feedback loop is a combination of worry/anxiety when you find yourself conscious of being awake in the middle of the night and a tendency to analyze the data looking for all the evidence you can find of any possible arousal in the flow rate data. And my guess is that every time you see something funky, you use that as evidence that something must be wrong with your breathing and sleep, and that feeds the zombie feelings.
And that means you need to work (hard) on teaching your body to break out of the feedback loop. You need to
teach your body that one arousal does not need to lead to more and more and more arousals.
As ozij said back on page 2:
ozij wrote: ↑Thu Mar 09, 2023 9:59 pm
Stop tracking your arousals!
Whenever you wake up, tell yourself: "Oh, right, that's normal, I should go back to sleep." Make yourself comfortable in bed and make try to continue sleeping.
You have trained your conscious brain to respond to normal arousals with driving yourself awake - you
have to train it to let you sleep.
You've gotten yourself into a vicious cycle of trying to monitor your sleep while you're sleeping, thereby keeping yourself from sleeping properly.
Obsessively documenting each and every "arousal" will lead you nowhere. If there's a breathing disturbance, OSCAR will record it without your help.
If you can't break out of that cycle, look for a cognitive behavioral sleep therapist that will help you do so.
Ozij's advice is spot on. Follow it.
And I'll add this: As someone who had to do cognitive behavior therapy to fix a similar, very severe problem, you need to be patient when working with the therapist. CBT-I is not an instant fix---it usually takes several weeks to a few months to replace the behaviors that are causing the problems with behaviors that teach your body to go back to sleep quickly after waking up in the middle of the night.
Good luck.
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