Java wrote:I have been using APAP for 18 months, 100% compliant, AHI under <1. My pressure is 13-18 with a med of 16.50ish. I still wake up every 90 minutes - 2 hours. It is so frustrating. I do have RLS, and about 6 months ago started Klonopin which completely cures my RLS symptoms.
These are likely NORMAL post REM wakes.
Even people without any sleep problems at all ofen wake up very briefly after the end of each REM cycle. And REM cycles tend to occur every 90-120 minutes or so.
The thing is: In a person with no identifiable sleep problems, the person wakes up momentarily, checks out that there is nothing "wrong" and immediately returns to sleep. Since the wake is typically shorter than 5 minutes in length, they may not even remember the wake in the morning.
So one of the best things you can do about these wakes that occurring every 90-120 minutes is to assume that they're normal post REM wakes and (literally) not stress out about them. Whatever you can do to NOT focus on them and NOT increase your wakefulness so you prolong the length of the wake excessively is really the best way of dealing with them.
So: What do you you as soon as you find yourself awake in the night? Do you immediately look at the clock? Do you immediately start worrying about the fact that you are awake (again)? Do you worry that it's going to take a while to get back to sleep? Does your mind immediately start "racing"?
My doctor just shrugs it off because my AHI is good and she says it's normal to wake up after each sleep cycle. Well maybe so, but I'd sure like to sleep threw the night, or maybe only get up once if that. If anyone finds a solution to this problem please let me know. And obviously I practice the good sleep hygiene, lights out, cold room, loose clothes, light covers, no eating before bed, no caffeine at night, etc...
Listen to your doc.
Right now you are most likely doing SOMETHING during each of those post REM wakes that makes them last at least 5-10 minutes in length just so you CAN remember them in the morning so that you can then WORRY about them.
One of the hardest things I've had to grapple with is the idea of "letting go" about obsessing and worrying about the nightly quality of my sleep. When I started PAP back in Sept 2010, it triggered a lot of very severe problems for me, including both a seemingly intractable case of insomnia and a significant shift in my sleep period (delayed sleep phase problems). It took a lot of hard work to rein in these problems. But after doing that work I wound up continuing to obsess about every little wake that showed up in my data for a long, long time. Since March, I've consciously worked on taking a "vacation" from the sleep journalling and the worrying about trying to fix the last of my sleep problems. And as I've quit obsessing quite so much about the problems, they've become less problematic.
Am I sleeping soundly
every single night at a time that I'd like to? No, not really---I still have my bad nights once or twice a week (at most). But on MOST nights, I sleep soundly enough---I remember 0-2 wakes, even though my data shows more than that. (I routinely turn my machine OFF and ON at every wake due to aerophagia issues, so the wakes show up in the data even though I don't remember most of them .) I don't worry about those unremembered wakes that show up in the data anymore---they're usually post-REM and cycling the machine OFF and ON did what I wanted it to do: It let me get back to sleep within a minute or two of waking instead of lying there worrying about getting aerophagia; hence I don't remember them and they have little or no impact on the overall quality of my sleep. And on MOST nights I'm getting sufficient sleep for me to feel decent the next day.
And as I've learned to quit worrying about trying to fix the remaining sleep problems, I've also noticed that the good nights are becoming the "norm" rather than the exception. It's not that I'm tracking them; its just that most mornings I'm waking up and I'm NOT immediately thinking about how bad the sleep was anymore.