Sleepyhead readings when awake?

About 4:30 this morning a large light bulb(off) exploded in our kitchen. I got up to see what the noise was, cleaned up the kitchen and went back to bed and turned CPAP on abt 15 min. Did not sleep afterword so gave up and listened to Pete Seeger until 5:30. Looking at my graphs I seem to have had a lot of hypopneas and RERAs while awake. I know the machine doesn't know when I am sleeping. Also when I talked to my husband about what the noise was I still had cpap on with my mask in place. I had no breathing issues at those times just throat clearing, sorta yawns, sniffs, turnovers and cover adjustments and adjusting volume.
What is the difference between waking graph bumps and lines and sleeping ones? They look the same and I know I was awake. I might, on a bad night have three snore lines. 99% at zero. All the rest now zero or one or two a night. How can I discourage the RERAs and Hypops which still visit regularly? Once in a while the AHI is under one and My graphs are great. I was much, much worse before CPAP and would like to talk to my doctor about adjustments to keep the RERAs down as they are the main occurrence. I am getting too old for patience with this and want the future years the best they can be.

Islandwoman wrote:... went back to bed and turned CPAP on abt 15 min. Did not sleep afterword so gave up and listened to Pete Seeger until 5:30. Looking at my graphs I seem to have had a lot of hypopneas and RERAs while awake. I know the machine doesn't know when I am sleeping. Also when I talked to my husband about what the noise was I still had cpap on with my mask in place. I had no breathing issues at those times just throat clearing, sorta yawns, sniffs, turnovers and cover adjustments and adjusting volume.

All the throat clearing, yawns, sniffs and turnovers and cover adjustments and adjusting the volume on Pete Seeger make your wake breathing a whole lot less regular than your normal sleep breathing. When we're awake our breathing is not controled by the autonomous nervous system---even when we're not consciously aware of it, our conscious nervous system controls our wake breathing.

It's the normal irregularity of wake breathing that can trigger the CPAP to score false events. For example, throat clearing, yawns, and a series of sniffs might result in breaths that are a bit deeper than "normal" and once you start to settle back down, the volume in each inhalation may drop by 50% from the deeper breathing and it if lasts for 10-40 seconds before more sniffing starts, it's possible that the (consciously and intentionally) reduced inhalations will look like a hypopnea or a RERA to the machine. Turning over in bed or reaching out to adjust the volume on your music playing device may come with you holding your breath (or almost holding your breath) for 10-15 seconds while you're concentrating on the task you're trying to do, and that too can be mis-scored as a H or a RERA or a CA or even an OA.

What is the difference between waking graph bumps and lines and sleeping ones? They look the same and I know I was awake.

In my data, wake breathing usually has more visible irregularity in it in the sense of respiratory rate and size of the inhalations. When I first wake up, there's a tendency for my inhalations to be a bit more rapid and deeper than the sleep breathing that proceeded it. And once I'm more fully awake, my breathing will often slow back down and the size of the inhalations goes down enough for my machine to score an H or two. But the shape of the inhalations looks pretty much the same as the shape of the inhalations when I'm asleep and not having problems with flow limitations or snoring.

I might, on a bad night have three snore lines. 99% at zero. All the rest now zero or one or two a night. How can I discourage the RERAs and Hypops which still visit regularly? Once in a while the AHI is under one and My graphs are great. I was much, much worse before CPAP and would like to talk to my doctor about adjustments to keep the RERAs down as they are the main occurrence. I am getting too old for patience with this and want the future years the best they can be.

Are you talking about RERAs and Hs that occur when you know you are asleep or awake?

There's not much you can or should do to try to eliminate RERAs and Hs that occur during periods when you know for a fact that you were awake---they're not sleep disordered breathing; they're simply the machine scoring events that are not real.

As for reducing RERAs and Hs scored when you know you are asleep, the usual way to try to reduce them is a bit more pressure. If you don't have any problems with your current pressure level, you could try increasing it by a cm or two. But keep in mind that trying to get to a near 0.0 AHI may be more trouble than its worth: The additional pressure needed to eliminate the last of the RERAs and Hs may be high enough to trigger problems with leaks or aerophagia. So if you do increase the pressure, you need to also track the all important How do you feel? data. If increasing the pressure doesn't make you feel any better (or perhaps makes you feel worse), then there may not be any point in trying to reduce them if your AHI is already well below 5.0