I keep waking up at 2am

hi all,

im new to this forum and i have a problem with my sleep pattern again.
I have been using a resmed S9 H5 humidifier without the climate control . occasionally, i sleep well and sometimes i wake up very early about 6 -8 hours. but lately for the past 2 days, i been sleeping for only 4 hours and i woke up so fresh. I couldn't go to bed to continue the sleep after that. I have been using cpap for 1 year plus now..

I need some advise here , can the mask or pressure was the caused of it? thanks.

I wake up after 4 hours sleep. Who knows what wakes me up. I dont get up,I just put my head back down and hope.

When I started CPAPing I took 5 mg of Zolpidem (generic Ambien) to fall asleep with the mask on my face. This lasted for 3 to 4 hours and then I got up to pee and took another 5 mg. After 6 months I gave up the Zolpidem and started to take 0.5 mg of Alprazolam ER (generic Xanax) once at 11 p.m. and sleep till 7 a.m., but still get up to pee twice. If for any reason I would not be able to fall asleep I would take 5 mg Zolpidem which would usually make me fall asleep within 15 min. If not I would take another 5 mg. All the above are minimal doses. Otherwise, you get hooked.

Hi,

I often woke up after 2 or 3 hours of sleep when I first started on CPAP. It took about 6 months for me to learn to sleep though the night. I still have this happen from time to time, maybe every other month or so. In fact, it often happens 2 nights in a row.

Unlike ozze_dollar posted above, I always get up if I wake up. There are few things as frustrating as not being able to sleep, and I don't want to associate my sleep environment with frustration. After I get up, I find that I get tired again pretty quickly, usually within an hour. I typically will watch a music video on DVD. I avoid anything that would get my brain going, so I don't check E-mail or play with my phone, and nothing that will shine light into my eyes (so I don't read).

If this is a fairly consistent pattern, you might want to check your machine data, or have your sleep clinic look at the data. It is possible that you are sleeping much better now than you were a year ago. As a result, you could be going into a deeper sleep and are even more relaxed, which can cause events that have the potential to wake you up. It is possible that you need your machine adjusted, and might even benefit from a new titration study.

-john-

There are REM cycles that you go through, about 3 hour loops (so says the drs) if you go to sleep around 11-11:30 then 2am is a normal "hey why the crap am I awake" time. I've been looking into it more because I also wake at 2am , there are all sorts of ideas about it, but they all seemingly agree that it' normal unless you have a brain spliting headache.

SneakerPumpernicle wrote:There are REM cycles that you go through, about 3 hour loops (so says the drs) if you go to sleep around 11-11:30 then 2am is a normal "hey why the crap am I awake" time. I've been looking into it more because I also wake at 2am , there are all sorts of ideas about it, but they all seemingly agree that it' normal unless you have a brain spliting headache.

Yep. The thing we folks who are (necessarily) obsessed with the quality of our sleep because we've got a diagnosed sleep problem is this: Even perfectly normal folks---those folks who do NOT have apnea and who do NOT have insomnia---still wake up in the night, often at the end of a REM cycle, but also if something external arouses them (a dog barking in the distance, the heater kicking on, the bed partner turning over, etc). The only thing is: Those normal people wake up briefly, figure out they don't need to be awake, and go back to sleep all within a couple of minutes, or maybe five minutes tops. And they don't remember these brief full awakenings the next morning simply because they are brief.

I've read in multiple places that it takes a five-minute long WAKE for a typical person to be able to remember it in the morning. (That is why most of us don't remember any of the arousals and wakes from our untreated OSA days: Most of the time the arousal didn't lead to a full wake and even when it did, we fell right back asleep as soon as we kick-started the dysfunctional breathing.)

But insomniacs in particular tend to remember more of these brief awakenings. And the very fact of waking tends to make us even more alert---and that prolongs the wake, often makes it more difficult to get back to sleep, and makes it much more likely for us to remember it the next morning.

And CPAPers who wake in the middle of the night often start behaving like insomniacs (heck, many of us are insomniacs). We wake up (briefly) for whatever reason. But instead of turning over and immediately going back to sleep, stuff start going through out mind. It might be directly related to the CPAP---heck that leak woke me up again. *sigh*. Or it might be directly related to our comfort---I'm in pain because of the aerophagia again. *sigh*. Or it might be a cluster of apneas/hypopneas that snuck by---I'm gasping for breath the way I used to wake up; I wonder if the pressure needs to be increased. *sigh* Or it could be any of those things that wake up folks who don't have OSA and who don't use a CPAP. But since many of us find our sleep somewhat fragmented by the CPAP itself in the early months of our therapy, we often tend to fall into the insomniac's trap of paying full attention to every single wake in the night.

And sometimes they just don't mean anything at all, but we get into the bad habit of worrying about them and letting them keep us awake for long periods of time. And for the record: A huge part of the sleep restricted schedule in my CBT for insomnia focused on training my mind and body to get back to the point where it could ignore the minor wakes and get back to sleep before that "five minute length" was reached. I still wake up frequently, but most of the time I fall back asleep within 5 minutes. And I'm no longer remembering each and every wake with crystal clarity.