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Sleep apnea

I'll add that my own case is complicated by another sleep disorder. Namely, without sleeping pills, I won't sleep more then 3 hours a night. Even with sleeping pills, I usually have to settle for 5-6 hours a night. The sleep doctor had to take me "kicking and screaming" to the sleeping pill route. I regarded it as a defeat to have to use a sleeping pill. Until that type of insomnia afflicted me, I never had a problem with falling asleep or staying asleep. Eventually, I had no choice but to say "uncle" and accept that I would need a sleeping pill to get more then 3 hours sleep. Sleep disorders are a bitch, whether apnea or insomnia...
 
Red said:
I'll add that my own case is complicated by another sleep disorder. Namely, without sleeping pills, I won't sleep more then 3 hours a night. Even with sleeping pills, I usually have to settle for 5-6 hours a night. The sleep doctor had to take me "kicking and screaming" to the sleeping pill route. I regarded it as a defeat to have to use a sleeping pill. Until that type of insomnia afflicted me, I never had a problem with falling asleep or staying asleep. Eventually, I had no choice but to say "uncle" and accept that I would need a sleeping pill to get more then 3 hours sleep. Sleep disorders are a bitch, whether apnea or insomnia...
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Dude when i was coming to the end of working night shift (after 6 years) i was lucky to get 25 hours sleep for the week. I was just running on adrenaline was terrible for me.
 
Red said:
I'm not sure how many times one wakes up per hour before the apnea is considered severe. My sleep apnea must be at least moderate. Uncontrolled, I imagine I wake up 20-30 times per hour.

When you wake up multiple times per hour, due to apnea, a couple of things result. One, you never reach deep sleep. You won't know this. You think you've slept 8 hours, or whatever. But waking up many times per hour, for mere fractions of a second, prevents you from reaching the deep restorative sleep the body needs. It also jolts the heart when one wakes up repeatedly. That's not good. Yes, controlling that helps.

We all need to reach deep sleep each night. On nights when my apnea might not be controlled as much as on other nights, I can usually tell the next day. There is a level of fatigue telling me I did not sleep as well as I would like. It's the cumulative affect of minimizing restorative deep sleep night after night that lays waste to daytime consciousness and energy. It affects the mind and the body.

I can only speak for myself. I know people who simply live with the apnea. Maybe if one has it to a minor degree, you can do that. But, for myself, allowing my body to reach deep sleep, and allow that deep sleep to be uninterrupted, which is what the CPAP machine allows, helps my daytime consciousness and energy.

Bottom line: sleep apnea interrupts deep sleep. Our bodies, and our minds, need uninterrupted deep sleep. It's that simple.
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Good explanation. When my apnea was in full force I was waking 60 to 70 times per hour. Although rarely fully awake. I also would gasp heavily, my wife described it as a roar, to get a breath at night, several times an hour. She slept in another room for almost a year. But all this meant I rarely entered into deep sleep, so realistically it was almost as bad as never sleeping.

It meant that during the day I could fall asleep almost like I had narcolepsy. I would spontaneously fall asleep at work, even driving. Reached a point where if we had to drive further than a few minutes away my wife drove everywhere.

Another bad effect of my particular type of apnea, obstructive, was that the tissue in my throat would close off and form a syphon, and pull contents from my stomach into my throat which I would then inhale with force when I gasped at night to get a breath. So I'd violently wake up trying to cough a bunch of vomit out of my lungs. I actually went to the ER once after an episode of this due to coughing so hard I was coughing up blood.

Getting your tonsils out as an adult sucks, almost as bad as anything I underwent in a year of cancer treatments, but it was my only option, and it changed my life for sure.
 
There’s a strong connection between exposure to blue light, melatonin, and natural sleep.



My sleep has been 1000% better since I started intermittent fasting (I finish with all eating by 7:00pm), and started wearing blue-blocking glasses at sundown. The final pieces of the puzzle were getting enough exercise earlier in the day, and giving myself an hour to appropriately wind down before I went to bed.
 
LogGrad98 said:
Getting your tonsils out as an adult sucks, almost as bad as anything I underwent in a year of cancer treatments, but it was my only option, and it changed my life for sure.
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That's about as bad a case of sleep apnea that I've ever heard of. Surgery was clearly the best thing you could have done. My brother-in-law went the surgical route as well. I remember him saying he had a sore throat for at least a month after the procedure, but it beats the hey out of that degree of sleep apnea!
 
NAOS said:
There’s a strong connection between exposure to blue light, melatonin, and natural sleep.



My sleep has been 1000% better since I started intermittent fasting (I finish with all eating by 7:00pm), and started wearing blue-blocking glasses at sundown. The final pieces of the puzzle were getting enough exercise earlier in the day, and giving myself an hour to appropriately wind down before I went to bed.
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Yep, all true to the best of my understanding. The last thing I should be doing just before bed is staring at my iPad, yet, it's almost always the last thing I'm doing before bed....
 
Red said:
Yep, all true to the best of my understanding. The last thing I should be doing just before bed is staring at my iPad, yet, it's almost always the last thing I'm doing before bed....
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It’s a hard habit to break. The least you can do is have a blue-blocking layer on the screen, and/or wear blue-blocking glasses.
 
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Because I'm overweight and have had health issues for awhile, doctors have tested me a few times over the years. Apparently 5-15 events per hour is mild, 15-30 is moderate, and 30+ is severe. I tested the last time at 7 (5 or less in previous times). Because I have lung and heart problems already, they put me on a CPAP for a few months, but it made me feel much worse, extremely exhausted, and people said I "looked gray." It didn't work for me partly because I'm allergic to the tubing/pillows/mask, and partly because air blowing into my head gives me terrible headaches, either from a fan, a CPAP or oxygen. Since my apnea is so mild, I'm no longer treating it. I've got much worse problems. But those with severe apnea shouldn't mess around with it. Family members who use CPAPs have said it dramatically improves their lives.
 
So many of you have said that your sleep apnea has improved dramatically and so forth but I haven’t seen anyone say how it’s changed their life. How it’s changed how they feel. Their energy levels. No more fatigue. Etc. Because they’re getting better sleep.

No one?
 
My aunt and uncle said that it makes them feel so much better in general, much less tired. When they are traveling and don't have their CPAP machines, they said there is a noticeable difference in how they feel. So now they make sure to take them everywhere.

My brother said he feels better when he uses it, but he has terrible sleeping habits and insomnia besides, so it isn't quite as helpful for him. But he admits that is mostly his own fault (Minecraft addiction and young children don't help) and he highly recommends using a CPAP.
 
Wes Mantooth said:
So many of you have said that your sleep apnea has improved dramatically and so forth but I haven’t seen anyone say how it’s changed their life. How it’s changed how they feel. Their energy levels. No more fatigue. Etc. Because they’re getting better sleep.

No one?
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Read reds post.

I think it gives me hella gas.

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JazzGal said:
I hadn't heard of this as a treatment option before, but apparently it does help some people with mild to moderate sleep apnea. Interesting.
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It definitely helps with insomnia. Though I'm just as surprised as you to learn that it helps with sleep apnea

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JazzGal said:
The only way I can see that reading a book would help sleep apnea is for those like me who stay up all night when engrossed in a good book. No sleep, no apnea.
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Every night I read before bed. Every night I tell myself I'm only gonna read for 20 minutes or whatever amount.
Every night I read longer than I told myself I would. I tell myself reading helps me go to sleep but it probably actually hurts the amount of sleep I get.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A6013 using JazzFanz mobile app
 
Wes Mantooth said:
So many of you have said that your sleep apnea has improved dramatically and so forth but I haven’t seen anyone say how it’s changed their life. How it’s changed how they feel. Their energy levels. No more fatigue. Etc. Because they’re getting better sleep.

No one?
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Getting my tonsils out has helped:

* sleep deeper
* sleep without having acid reflux
* eliminate snoring
* energy level

Because I’m sleeping more and deeper I have more energy and get sick less often. But some of that could be attributed to just getting my tonsils taken out as they were always infected
 
fishonjazz said:
Every night I read before bed. Every night I tell myself I'm only gonna read for 20 minutes or whatever amount.
Every night I read longer than I told myself I would. I tell myself reading helps me go to sleep but it probably actually hurts the amount of sleep I get.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A6013 using JazzFanz mobile app
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I usually do 30 minutes then I get suoer drowsy. Mind you I typically start smoking weed around 8 pm, so by 11 Im starting to gey heavy drowsy affects.
 
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