Trouble Breathing in the Morning

I'm brand new to BIPAP, have been using it for 1 week now (with supplemental oxygen). I didn't have much trouble getting used to sleeping with the nasal pillows. But as soon as I disconnect after waking up in the morning I have the very unpleasant sensation of not being able to breathe. It's hard to describe. If I try to breathe through my nose it feels like my nasal passages have collapsed or something. Not exactly stuffy, but just... closed. And to a lesser extent I have the same sensation breathing through my mouth. When I check my blood oxygen saturation, it's between 95% and 99%.

Fortunately it doesn't last very long maybe from a few minutes to a half hour. But a feeling of "heaviness" in my lungs lingers for longer. I'm not coughing and I don't feel congested per se. As I said, it's hard to describe. I do have well-controlled adult-onset asthma, but it never felt like this. Could BIPAP somehow exacerbate asthma?e I would think the opposite would be the case.

Hi. This sounds very similar to the sensation I was trying to describe in my post on Thursday. I described it as a kind of suffocating feeling. It happens to me in the morning after sleeping quite happily for a while with the machine. It either wakes me up and I just feel I can't breathe and have to rip the mask off or I partly wake up to change position or with dry mouth and then when I try to relax again the sensation happens and I have to take the mask off which is really frustrating. It's interesting a lot of you mentioned having counseling for unrelated anxiety, etc. I have counseling for PTSD due to childhood trauma and I am really anxious and stressed at the moment due to non-sleep related issues, although getting used to the machine has been more stressful than I hoped.
I do get a bit of this sensation when I first put on the mask and start to try and sleep, but can manage to try and calm myself down and convince myself it's in my mind. The difference is that when I'm asleep or drifting back and only partly awake I can't do this so I think I give into the natural panic which makes the feeling worse. I've tried leaving the mask off relaxing a few minutes, sat up with my eyes closed and then slowly putting the mask on again and using it sat up for a while and then when I get used to it trying laying down and going back to sleep and this helps.
Another trigger for me which is very distressing is the warm air sensation around my mouth when I breathe out with the machine on auto-ramp. I am going to try setting the auto-ramp with a higher starting pressure to see if this can clear my exhaled breath from the mask. I know this aversion to the warm air feeling is definitely related to my childhood issues and is a long-standing fear. Any warm air sensation in front of my mouth sets off a panic attack.
I'm going to try a humidifier to help with dry mouth but I'm worried that this may just increase the warm air sensation in the mask. Sorry if I digressed from the original point which was that anxiety seems to be a common factor in a lot of people with this issue.

I think you may misunderstand features of Cpap - you have either a plain cpap machine or an auto (that can be set in plain cpap mode if you want).

On an auto machine there will be a min. and a max. pressure setting - usually something like 7 and 15 to 20. And it's the min. setting that counts.

There is also a ramp feature that, if your min. prescribed pressure is actually set quite high (e.g. 12) and you find it difficult to adjust to breathing at that level immediately on masking, the ramp can be set to gradually increase pressure from 4 (the default low of machines) to e.g. 12, over a certain time period that you set. However, while the ramp is working up to 12, you're only getting partial treatment of course, so it's generally a good idea - if you choose to use the ramp - to set a short time frame vs a longer one, and/or to try to adjust to not using it at all as most of us do within a few weeks, if that long.

So your min/max pressure settings are the prescribed ones, the ramp setting is your choice to use at whatever you set it at, or not at all.

Get yourself evaluated. Could be acid reflex. Cpap doesn't cause it, but if you have it already, cpap can sometimes make it worse, at least for awhile.

Hi sleepyUK,

Might I suggest that you read the reply I've just posted in the other thread that you started.