Tangible Signs of Sleep Apnea Improvement?
How to measure how well I slept?
When I think about how to measure my sleep, I think about it in three different components. The first being, how many apneas (hypo, obstructive, clear) did I have. The second being how long did I sleep. The third being how well I feel like I slept. The third one would be what I would consider normal sleep phases. Light sleep, deep sleep, REM. The first two components are easy to measure since my cpap machine does it for me. The third one is really subjective. I have found that I need all three components to be good for me to wake up feeling good.
The fact that there are three different components makes judging improvements somewhat difficult and a bit subjective. For example if I had very few apnea events because I laid awake most of the night, my sleep apnea numbers would look great! Unfortunately, I would wake up feeling tired. Same thing with length of sleep. If I slept for 5 hours with very few events, again my sleep apnea numbers would look great, but I would still wake up tired. So how do you measure improvements in sleep apnea knowing that just numbers may not reflect true improvement? It is a tricky thing. I have been cautious in diving too much into cpap numbers because they can be deceiving and I wanted to make sure I was seeing real improvement.
All that being said, I can say last night was without a doubt an improvement in all 3 categories that I can’t remember having in years. Therefore I think its worth posting that this seems fairly convincing to me that my sleep apnea, at least for last night, improved measureably.
My Sleep Events
My AHI Number
What the numbers mean
The sleep graph shows that last night I had one hyponea (partial block) and two clear airway apneas (open airway). My pressure is set at 4.5. The machine only goes down to 4.0 which I have found is too low to breath on. I slept for 8 hours and 15 minutes straight. That equates to an AHI number of 0.36.
So for the first component, sleep events, I had nearly zero!. For the second component, length of sleep, I got 8 straight hours. The last subject component is quality. I was out like a light. I remember waking up briefly once. I also remember parts of a couple of dreams. It is really exciting to see that kind of a night of sleep. As a note, when I was diagnosed, my sleep study AHI was 33. My pressure was set at 8. Last night I have nearly zero apneas with the pressure on the machine as low as I can go.
I am super cautious about this, but I do feel like this is an indication that the vitamin D protocol that I am following by Dr. Gominak is really improving both my sleep and my sleep apnea.
What sleep tracker do you use?
Question for those of you that have some sort of sleep tracker. Which one do you use? Do you feel it tracks your sleep phases to some degree? I used to have a ZEO and I am looking for something that I can use to track that elusive 3 component of my sleep. If you use one that you like, can you leave a comment and tell me which it is?