The Sleep Nomad

A Sleep, Sleep Apnea & Insomia blog

Vitamin D and Sleep - Month 3

2018-09-02 The Sleep NomadVitamin D

unsplash.com

Vitamin D and Sleep - Month 3

Month 3 continued with improved sleep with up and down days. The most notable thing that occurred was feeling more energy. I still woke up on some days feeling tired. Usually days like these would be a struggle to get through. I found that even in my tired state, I had more reserves to keep going. This is also when I started to focus a bit more on my diet and exercise. I started to think about trying to eliminate the sleep apnea as fast as I could. This also led to my first mistake on this vitamin D journey.

Patience, Grasshopper!

As I started to feel better, I thought maybe I could push the envelope with my sleep apnea. I use both a CPAP machine and a dental mouth piece. The combo is nice because at the time I got the mouth piece, I was able to lower my CPAP pressure. I wasn’t able to use just the mouth piece even though my sleep study came back at 2 AHI. Or two events per hour. Even though this is within the less than 5 AHI that is considered normal, I felt like a train wreck. Hence, the reason I use both together.

Well towards the end of month 3, I tried sleeping with just the mouth piece again. I tried it for two nights in a row. That was all I could take. Clearly, I was not ready for this and I realized improving sleep apnea is going to take time. There are two takeways from this. The first is that before I tried this again, I would buy an overnight pulse oximeter so I had some idea of how safe I was. How much was I desaturating? With the cpap machine, I can see how many events I had at night. Without the machine data, I had no idea what had happened. That concerned me.

The second thing that I encountered again from this experience is something my sleep dentist coined “cpap withdrawal”. He told me it takes about 3 days for your body to adjust to not having the cpap machine. In my own experience, it takes a solid week for me to really get off the machine. Three times in the past 8 years, I have gone weeks to a month using just the mouth piece. Usually the first week is rough. Then I feel much better for a time. Eventually the tiredness comes back and I start using the CPAP machine again. At some point in the future, I plan to try this again but when I feel more confident in getting off the machine.

The Sleep Nomad Green Drink

As I mentioned, I started to see healing sleep apnea and sleeping in general as a whole body kind of thing. With that, I wanted to start eating all the things I could think of that would improve my gut bacteria and body in general. My favorite online person when it comes to nutrition is Dr. Rhonda Patrick PhD. She has a Ph.D in biomedical science. She is awesome at sharing information and making complicated things seem simple. Things like broccoli sprouts, tumeric and of course vitamin D. She has amazing videos. One of them includes an interview with a sleep specialist. I plan to do a post about that in the future. Check out her site at FoundMyFitness. She has a great green smoothie where she breaks down all the macro nutrients. Here is her smoothie recipe. I made a modified version of this and I will post about it next time.

Sleep well!

unsplash-logoMark Harpur