Apnea Forum Posting

Posted by Aussie Keith on September 20, 2000 at 12:19:48:

In Reply to: Aerophagia and sleep fragmentation - information? posted by Super-Human Gasbag on September 19, 2000 at 22:22:16:

When I first went on to CPAP 7 months ago, what I now know to be aerophagia was a major issue. Waking up full of air after 4 hours sleep was painful and tiring. The problem began to ease by itself after the first month (solved subconsciously somehow) and now recurs only occasionally - possibly spurred by allergy, but I can't be sure about this.

Sleep fragmentation, however, continues and is clearly related to more than aerophagia. It really is a thief of decent sleep and does not help the problem of accumulated sleep debt. It is clear that sleep, and what happens during sleep, is the outcome of a complex mix of many factors. Among these a whole bunch of dysfunctionalities (OK, bad habits) accumulated over many years of sleep deprivation.

I deal with these assumptions in two ways:

(1) By experimenting with different methods of improving sleep duration and quality. (For example, I've found that going to bed dog tired results in a worse night's sleep than going to bed just ordinarily tired, so I'm trying an afternoon nap to see what impact it has on the night sleep. I'm recording this faithfully and will report to a future forum in 6 weeks or so when the 'experiment' is over).

(2) By repeating to myself the mantra that I was a long time with OSA so it's going to take a fair while to get the sleep act back together again. And, like a long climb up a rope, there's bound to be a bit of slippage involved.

Beyond all this, of course, there are the individual differences that make each of our cases unique. That's why, I think, if we're fair dinkum (Australian for serious) about improving our own sleep performance we have to take some responsibility for learning more about our current sleep habits (perhaps by recording each morning how much sleep we got, how many times we fragged, why, whether there was aerophagia, whether the mask leaked, why, with what effects, etc etc) and conducting some sensible 'citizen's experimentation' (napping, aking a stroll before sleep, cutting out coffee, trying an extra pillow, taking away a pillow etc etc) to see how that effects things.

And then sharing the results on this forum as we collectively try to better understand our own situations.

It's hard sometimes. When I discussed my poor sleep performance with my GP (doc) the other day, he told me I should be "happy to get 4 hours compared with how you were (pre CPAP) a year ago". It's an attitude hardly calculated to induce improvement. I think we can all do better than that.

My sleep performance has improved over 7 months from 4 to nearly 7 hours a night. The aerophagia is not totally gone but it impacts later in the sleep and less frequently. Badly fragmentation is still a problem - hard to fix but I'm working on it. I expect there'll be other issues. They'll just have to be managed.

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