I went through the whole process of seeing an ENT, using the machine for the at-home sleep study so insurance would give me a CPAP, then not being able to sleep with a CPAP, and over the course of a couple years I fixed my sleep apnea by fixing my posture and breathing. If you have forward head posture or are not used to breathing through your nose, you might also benefit from this. I think it’s kind of crazy that we do surgeries and take medicine that modifies your brain chemistry for what is likely in many cases a structural issue.
If you’re curious to try this, read James Nestor’s book Breath, do yoga with breathing exercises, or see a physical therapist. It takes time to fix these structural issues, but you can literally change the shape of your nose, palate, and jaw from just practice.
I had bad sleep apnea until last year, sleeping 8-9 hours a night and usually feeling tired in the morning.
As of the last 12 months it seems to be heald, after I used mouth tape and a nasal dilator consistently for 30 nights in a row. I highly recommend trying this, it was quite cheap (~$20) and the change seems to have been permanent.
I used 3m micro-pore tape that doesn't tear the facial hair, and the nasal dilator I used was called "woody knows", though there are many brands that may work just as well. I barely snore anymore where I used to be a raging snorer according to those in the know and my own audio recordings of myself. Most importantly, I only need about 7 to 7.5 hours of sleep now and I will wake up feeling well rested most days. I can also breathe exclusively through my nose now where before I could not. I can take very big breaths through just the nose and do this now when exercising.
I don't think it's all perfect though as I still often breathe through my mouth. I'm starting to wear the mouth tape at night again as an experiment - it really isn't that annoying.
Relatedly, I recently started looking into "mewing" after a breath-work teacher I took classes with recommended it to me as she has been doing it with good results (improved breathing). It seems related to this as Mew recommends keeping the mouth shut all the time. I intend to try the mewing exercises and see if that helps my breathing further.
People should be more aware of the symptoms of sleep apneas - the lack of energy during the day, feeling tired, waking up throughout the night, waking up tired/exhausted, etc. People with untreated sleep apnea have multiple folds higher chances to be depressed, unemployed, and have trouble with basic life functions, in addition to the long term health consequences of depriving your brain from Oxygen.
I've suggested 4 people over the last couple of years to get tested based on them casually mentioning some of these symptoms, and all 4 got diagnosed with moderate to severe sleep apnea (which is classified by the number of times you stopped breathing every hour - AHI, and the blood oxygen level). Getting tested is easy and cheap - you can find kits for under $100 which essentially are just a monitor you attach your finger + a few ECG stickers on your body which you use for a couple of nights. You can order them online without talking to a doctor, and you will get a prescription for CPAP if you are diagnosed as positive.
Treatment with CPAP is highly effective in eliminating these symptoms, and also reversing the brain damage (although MRI scans shows that it takes around a year for the gray matter in your brain to restore itself).
The other suggestion I'd make is that if you are overweight or obese, GLP-1 has proven to be also a miracle drug for sleep apnea. Unlike the study mentioned above, that essentially reduced the average AHI of participants by 4, which for almost everyone wouldn't cure them. Drugs like Zepbound have shown that over half are cured from sleep apnea after roughly a year of use. This is in addition to the other health benefits they provide with the weight reduction. Essentially. This unfortunately won't work for everyone, as weight is not the only cause of sleep apnea, but it is by far the most common one.
I've tried a CPAP machine for 6 weeks and felt no different and gave up. I think I was a 6 on the scale. I wish it had worked though!
Currently I've just given up and embracing feeling relatively tired all the time. I've tried side sleeping devices (woody knows backpack) mandibular advancement splints etc.
So hard to tell (I find anyway) to get to a definitive answer
> People should be more aware of the symptoms of sleep apneas
I'm always a bit puzzled that this needs to be pointed out? I don't have sleep apnea per se, at least not chronically, but I've definitely had bouts of it due to allergy, sickness, stuff like that. The symptoms are the same because the mechanism is the same: I didn't get enough oxygen in the night.
It's always glaringly obvious to me the next day. I feel way more tired and exhausted than I normally would given the amount of sleep. I sometimes had instances of waking up gasping for air.
I really don't need to be told in those instances that there was an issue during the night. My sleep didn't sleep, of course there's something wrong and needs to be looked at?
Like, one time's a fluke, but if it happens a lot...
It’s typically something that sets in over time (often, but not always with weight gain and age), most people don’t notice because it’s gradual. Especially if they aren’t in normal risk groups. OSA symptoms are easy for an individual (and clinicians) to misatribute
Yeah, but I've met people who think it's "normal" to wake up tired and exhausted even after multiple (or even many) nights of sufficient sleep, time-wise.
I remember one person who thought waking up tired is just part of being an adult?
The original comment said "multiple folds higher chances to be depressed, unemployed", for me that's a bit like saying that being on fire has a very high chance to make you depressed and unemployed.
Yeah, of course that's true, but the effect on performance and well-being after a sleep apnea night is so obvious to me, I don't have to look for the proximate cause...
EDIT: Through the other answer came to me that maybe in other cases, it's not so directly obvious just after waking up.
I think it’s important to know your personal context levels.
You noticed it because it’s happened to you occasionally. What about people who’ve been experiencing it most of their lives? To them, they are just tired all the time and don’t know why. It could be any number of things.
To someone who’s never experienced it, how could they understand?
My wife has bad sleep apnea and has to use a CPAP - neither of us noticed or understood the issue until she did a sleep study to deal with her bad snoring. We knew she was tired all the time, but attributed it to factors like work stress or maybe diet.
The average person’s understanding of sleep apnea is probably around the level of “it exists and they have to wear a device at night” and not much more.
I guess. This is a good answer, it did made me recontextualize.
Maybe it was always that much obvious to me that what should have been a good night of sleep had no, or maybe even a negative, effect on my wellbeing, and therefore something must be wrong during the sleep.
But if the effects are a bit more muted and accumulate more gradually, and you've never heard much about sleep apnea, you might not directly attribute it to the sleep itself.
I have severe obstructive sleep apnea -- am 6ft and 210. I wear a CPAP and now swear by it. A couple things to help those who try:
1) Make sure you have a CPAP machine with a water tank so the forced air is moist. For me, if the water runs out, that's when I wake up bc my nose dries.
2) Get a spray saline solution for your nose -- not Afrin or drugs (habit inducing) -- just simply and cheap Arm & Hammer Simply Saline.
3) Wear a shirt when you're in bed and put the hose under your shirt so it's hard to roll off.
4) Bonus -- sleep elevated.
Those are my best tips. If you can do the CPAP and suffer the awkwardness, you'll really feel so much better. First time it stuck, I woke up at 4:45 am fully rested and felt as if a heavy weight was lifted off me.
I don't have sleep apnea, as in, my severe snoring doesn't cause significant drops in blood oxygen levels, but it's still severely impacted my life - when my wife and I married, I spent the first night of our honeymoon awake so that she could sleep.
Oh and it's so loud that I'm at risk of damaging my own hearing.
And I bounced off CPAP hard, no matter what I tried, I would eventually remove the mask in my sleep, it was heartbreaking, I was so excited to finally be able to fall asleep beside my wife.
I also tried the mouth guards and would wake up panicking and gagging.
So my only other option currently is self-funding expensive surgery (our public system doesn't fund treatment for severe snoring unless it causes apnoea, and my private health insurance excludes the most expensive portions shrug), which like all surgery, carries no guarantees of success, and also carries the risk that any general anaesthesia application does.
So this is awesome! I just hope it continues proving efficacious and safe.
It only reduces by 4 events per hour. That seems like it might be helpful for someone with mild sleep apnea. But not with moderate or severe sleep apnea.
Adult AHI Severity Levels
Normal: Less than (5) events per hour.
Mild Sleep Apnea: (5) to (14.9) events per hour (frequent minor interruptions).
Moderate Sleep Apnea: (15) to (29.9) events per hour.Severe Sleep Apnea: (30) or more events per hour.
"By mapping the neural circuits that lead to this common condition, work from the Horner lab laid the foundation for AD109, a new treatment developed by researchers in Boston to specifically target the two pathways that contribute to sleep apnea. The daily oral medication contains two drugs: one that increases noradrenaline levels and another that blocks muscarinic receptors.
In a recently published phase 3 randomized clinical trial, people with mild to severe sleep apnea who received AD109 had less airway obstruction and higher oxygen levels than those who received a placebo. On average, per hour of sleep, participants on AD109 had four fewer events where they stopped breathing or had very shallow breathing."
They say later in the article that the pill is a good option for folks that can't or won't use the CPAP.
A CPAP is really effective, so it would be first line treatment. If I couldn't use one but needed it, I'd be happy to have fewer events per hour than all of it. Improvement is better than nothing in this case. Besides, a lot of drugs are improved after the initial breakthrough drug - so this gives hope that we might actually be able to be free of the CPAP for many more folks.
Oof, and here I thought my AHI of 69 was bad (which it kind of is regardless). My condolences. Glad the CPAP helped, it completely and utterly changed my life too.
The difference maker for me was an app, Snore Lab. that my son told me to try. It said that my snoring was EPIC. That led to my current CPAP use, for which the benefits [no daytime sleepiness, more energy, no food cravings] exceed the hassle [mask wearing, cleaning routine, supplies reordering.]
Four events per hour AHI improvement would not be a meaningful change for my therapy, but this is the beginning of better treatment options in the future.
The best benefit of CPAP is that it thwarts heart arrhythmias which arise from depriving the brain of oxygen.
I highly recommend BongoRX (https://bongorx.com/) if you have sleep apnea and can't deal with CPAP. The mechanism: it makes it a little harder to breathe out, which keeps your airways more open when you breathe in next.
The pictures on the website are a little misleading: it comes with a strap to keep the device in your nostrils, so they don't just fall out in the middle of the night.
I wake up without my cpap mask after a few hours every night. In total I might get 6 hours with it after putting it on multiple times.
Doctors think I’m doing fine due to total amount of hours used, and my resmed cpap claims I’m at below 1 event/hour. I’m not doing fine and I think the numbers are lying to me.
I snore a million, my mouth gets dry, and my nose tightens up, so my nasal mask isn’t always that nice to use. Other masks also annoy me.
What do? I haven’t sleep a solid 8 hours for 3-4 years :(
Obviously I don’t know you or your specific situation, but I lost 120 pounds taking Zepbound and my apnea is gone. I make sure to take fluticasone in each nostril before I sleep, but getting to a healthy weight eliminated my apnea.
If you aren’t overweight, this might not help, but hopefully it’ll help someone!
Great. Something like 60% of OSA cases are linked to obesity. GLP-1 drugs could probably lead to resolution for a lot of them if the Lilly SURMOUNT-OSA trial tells us anything.
Although there is a link in many cases, there are a lot of cases where there’s no obesity link at all.
The preconception that it is mostly obesity related is a dangerous stigma since it prevents a lot of people understanding what is happening and getting treatment.
I started with sleep apnea in my 20s when I was in amazing physical condition. I would jolt awake, heart racing, almost panic attack levels. No idea what was happening.. took me another 15 years to do a sleep study and get diagnosed, and CPAP treatment literally overnight cured the condition. I went from 20-30 events per night to less than 1 on average.
If anyone has any sleep issues at all, or suspects any.. go get a sleep study. It’s not as scary as it sounds and there’s no downside to having one done.
Surprisingly the most effective treatment I've found for my own apnea is just wearing an inexpensive soft cervical collar to sleep, but there are lots of different things that can contribute to sleep apnea, so YMMV.
After dealing with unexplained ectopic heartbeats (sometimes PVCs, sometimes PACs) I saw a chain of doctors and that included both getting a sleep study done and seeing a cardiologist.
I was diagnosed with mild apnea (AHI just above 10), but despite the apnea being mild on the AHI scale, my Sp02 blood oxygen percentage was dropping into the low 80%s for extended periods per night down from a normal 95-99% most of the time.
I weigh 180 lbs at 6 foot 2, being overweight was a non-factor in my apnea.
Got a CPAP machine, it helped but even after dialing in my personally optimal pressure settings using the CPAP data with OSCAR my AHI was still kind of all over the place, from under 1 to as much as 6 seemingly randomly per night with no mechanical issues like mask leaks showing up.
Had heard (on reddit /r/CPAP) about some people using soft cervical collars to help with their apnea and I gave it a try and when wearing one my AHI drops down to 0.0 - 0.4 per night. The collar alone helps more consistently in my case than the CPAP machine does.
Basically my sleep apnea is almost entirely due to the fact that when I'm sleeping (even on my side, but worse on my back) I seem to naturally tuck my chin in toward my neck in a way that constricts my upper airway and the collar stops this from happening. This is very much YMMV, there are lots of different causes of apnea.
If you’re curious to try this, read James Nestor’s book Breath, do yoga with breathing exercises, or see a physical therapist. It takes time to fix these structural issues, but you can literally change the shape of your nose, palate, and jaw from just practice.
As of the last 12 months it seems to be heald, after I used mouth tape and a nasal dilator consistently for 30 nights in a row. I highly recommend trying this, it was quite cheap (~$20) and the change seems to have been permanent. I used 3m micro-pore tape that doesn't tear the facial hair, and the nasal dilator I used was called "woody knows", though there are many brands that may work just as well. I barely snore anymore where I used to be a raging snorer according to those in the know and my own audio recordings of myself. Most importantly, I only need about 7 to 7.5 hours of sleep now and I will wake up feeling well rested most days. I can also breathe exclusively through my nose now where before I could not. I can take very big breaths through just the nose and do this now when exercising.
I don't think it's all perfect though as I still often breathe through my mouth. I'm starting to wear the mouth tape at night again as an experiment - it really isn't that annoying.
Relatedly, I recently started looking into "mewing" after a breath-work teacher I took classes with recommended it to me as she has been doing it with good results (improved breathing). It seems related to this as Mew recommends keeping the mouth shut all the time. I intend to try the mewing exercises and see if that helps my breathing further.
I've suggested 4 people over the last couple of years to get tested based on them casually mentioning some of these symptoms, and all 4 got diagnosed with moderate to severe sleep apnea (which is classified by the number of times you stopped breathing every hour - AHI, and the blood oxygen level). Getting tested is easy and cheap - you can find kits for under $100 which essentially are just a monitor you attach your finger + a few ECG stickers on your body which you use for a couple of nights. You can order them online without talking to a doctor, and you will get a prescription for CPAP if you are diagnosed as positive.
Treatment with CPAP is highly effective in eliminating these symptoms, and also reversing the brain damage (although MRI scans shows that it takes around a year for the gray matter in your brain to restore itself).
The other suggestion I'd make is that if you are overweight or obese, GLP-1 has proven to be also a miracle drug for sleep apnea. Unlike the study mentioned above, that essentially reduced the average AHI of participants by 4, which for almost everyone wouldn't cure them. Drugs like Zepbound have shown that over half are cured from sleep apnea after roughly a year of use. This is in addition to the other health benefits they provide with the weight reduction. Essentially. This unfortunately won't work for everyone, as weight is not the only cause of sleep apnea, but it is by far the most common one.
Currently I've just given up and embracing feeling relatively tired all the time. I've tried side sleeping devices (woody knows backpack) mandibular advancement splints etc.
So hard to tell (I find anyway) to get to a definitive answer
I'm always a bit puzzled that this needs to be pointed out? I don't have sleep apnea per se, at least not chronically, but I've definitely had bouts of it due to allergy, sickness, stuff like that. The symptoms are the same because the mechanism is the same: I didn't get enough oxygen in the night.
It's always glaringly obvious to me the next day. I feel way more tired and exhausted than I normally would given the amount of sleep. I sometimes had instances of waking up gasping for air.
I really don't need to be told in those instances that there was an issue during the night. My sleep didn't sleep, of course there's something wrong and needs to be looked at?
Like, one time's a fluke, but if it happens a lot...
I remember one person who thought waking up tired is just part of being an adult?
The original comment said "multiple folds higher chances to be depressed, unemployed", for me that's a bit like saying that being on fire has a very high chance to make you depressed and unemployed.
Yeah, of course that's true, but the effect on performance and well-being after a sleep apnea night is so obvious to me, I don't have to look for the proximate cause...
EDIT: Through the other answer came to me that maybe in other cases, it's not so directly obvious just after waking up.
You noticed it because it’s happened to you occasionally. What about people who’ve been experiencing it most of their lives? To them, they are just tired all the time and don’t know why. It could be any number of things.
To someone who’s never experienced it, how could they understand?
My wife has bad sleep apnea and has to use a CPAP - neither of us noticed or understood the issue until she did a sleep study to deal with her bad snoring. We knew she was tired all the time, but attributed it to factors like work stress or maybe diet.
The average person’s understanding of sleep apnea is probably around the level of “it exists and they have to wear a device at night” and not much more.
Maybe it was always that much obvious to me that what should have been a good night of sleep had no, or maybe even a negative, effect on my wellbeing, and therefore something must be wrong during the sleep.
But if the effects are a bit more muted and accumulate more gradually, and you've never heard much about sleep apnea, you might not directly attribute it to the sleep itself.
1) Make sure you have a CPAP machine with a water tank so the forced air is moist. For me, if the water runs out, that's when I wake up bc my nose dries.
2) Get a spray saline solution for your nose -- not Afrin or drugs (habit inducing) -- just simply and cheap Arm & Hammer Simply Saline.
3) Wear a shirt when you're in bed and put the hose under your shirt so it's hard to roll off.
4) Bonus -- sleep elevated.
Those are my best tips. If you can do the CPAP and suffer the awkwardness, you'll really feel so much better. First time it stuck, I woke up at 4:45 am fully rested and felt as if a heavy weight was lifted off me.
Best luck :)
Oh and it's so loud that I'm at risk of damaging my own hearing.
And I bounced off CPAP hard, no matter what I tried, I would eventually remove the mask in my sleep, it was heartbreaking, I was so excited to finally be able to fall asleep beside my wife.
I also tried the mouth guards and would wake up panicking and gagging.
So my only other option currently is self-funding expensive surgery (our public system doesn't fund treatment for severe snoring unless it causes apnoea, and my private health insurance excludes the most expensive portions shrug), which like all surgery, carries no guarantees of success, and also carries the risk that any general anaesthesia application does.
So this is awesome! I just hope it continues proving efficacious and safe.
Adult AHI Severity Levels
Normal: Less than (5) events per hour.
Mild Sleep Apnea: (5) to (14.9) events per hour (frequent minor interruptions).
Moderate Sleep Apnea: (15) to (29.9) events per hour.Severe Sleep Apnea: (30) or more events per hour.
"By mapping the neural circuits that lead to this common condition, work from the Horner lab laid the foundation for AD109, a new treatment developed by researchers in Boston to specifically target the two pathways that contribute to sleep apnea. The daily oral medication contains two drugs: one that increases noradrenaline levels and another that blocks muscarinic receptors.
In a recently published phase 3 randomized clinical trial, people with mild to severe sleep apnea who received AD109 had less airway obstruction and higher oxygen levels than those who received a placebo. On average, per hour of sleep, participants on AD109 had four fewer events where they stopped breathing or had very shallow breathing."
A CPAP is really effective, so it would be first line treatment. If I couldn't use one but needed it, I'd be happy to have fewer events per hour than all of it. Improvement is better than nothing in this case. Besides, a lot of drugs are improved after the initial breakthrough drug - so this gives hope that we might actually be able to be free of the CPAP for many more folks.
Four events per hour AHI improvement would not be a meaningful change for my therapy, but this is the beginning of better treatment options in the future.
The best benefit of CPAP is that it thwarts heart arrhythmias which arise from depriving the brain of oxygen.
The pictures on the website are a little misleading: it comes with a strap to keep the device in your nostrils, so they don't just fall out in the middle of the night.
FDA-approved, and does require a prescription...
Doctors think I’m doing fine due to total amount of hours used, and my resmed cpap claims I’m at below 1 event/hour. I’m not doing fine and I think the numbers are lying to me.
I snore a million, my mouth gets dry, and my nose tightens up, so my nasal mask isn’t always that nice to use. Other masks also annoy me.
What do? I haven’t sleep a solid 8 hours for 3-4 years :(
If you aren’t overweight, this might not help, but hopefully it’ll help someone!
The preconception that it is mostly obesity related is a dangerous stigma since it prevents a lot of people understanding what is happening and getting treatment.
I started with sleep apnea in my 20s when I was in amazing physical condition. I would jolt awake, heart racing, almost panic attack levels. No idea what was happening.. took me another 15 years to do a sleep study and get diagnosed, and CPAP treatment literally overnight cured the condition. I went from 20-30 events per night to less than 1 on average.
If anyone has any sleep issues at all, or suspects any.. go get a sleep study. It’s not as scary as it sounds and there’s no downside to having one done.
After dealing with unexplained ectopic heartbeats (sometimes PVCs, sometimes PACs) I saw a chain of doctors and that included both getting a sleep study done and seeing a cardiologist.
I was diagnosed with mild apnea (AHI just above 10), but despite the apnea being mild on the AHI scale, my Sp02 blood oxygen percentage was dropping into the low 80%s for extended periods per night down from a normal 95-99% most of the time.
I weigh 180 lbs at 6 foot 2, being overweight was a non-factor in my apnea.
Got a CPAP machine, it helped but even after dialing in my personally optimal pressure settings using the CPAP data with OSCAR my AHI was still kind of all over the place, from under 1 to as much as 6 seemingly randomly per night with no mechanical issues like mask leaks showing up.
Had heard (on reddit /r/CPAP) about some people using soft cervical collars to help with their apnea and I gave it a try and when wearing one my AHI drops down to 0.0 - 0.4 per night. The collar alone helps more consistently in my case than the CPAP machine does.
Basically my sleep apnea is almost entirely due to the fact that when I'm sleeping (even on my side, but worse on my back) I seem to naturally tuck my chin in toward my neck in a way that constricts my upper airway and the collar stops this from happening. This is very much YMMV, there are lots of different causes of apnea.