Hello Ruby My problem is not as straight forward as an obstructive sleep apnea sufferer. I actually experience an apnea just as I transition from wakefullness to the first stage of sleep. Thus its called sleep onset apnea or sleep transition apnea. This is unheard of in South Africa and Drs have no clue how to even approach it. Life has been pretty tough for the past 18 months. Just as I fall asleep I wake up immediately gasping for air. The constant arousals keep me up for days on end . I am doing research and was surprised to hear that I am not alone. I also learnt that a cpap machine is not the answer as such apneas is central. I been classified after a sleep study as having mild obstuctive sleep apnea. But all apneatic episodes occurrd in first few minutes of the little sleep I had only after I took a sleeping pill. That is just briefly what I am experiencing and would love to connect with others in the same boat. A few people were on the forum a while back .
I am not a medical professional, but from my understanding of sleep apnea it is not in my opinion a good assumption that your onset apnea is central in nature. It could be, but it is just as likely or even more likely that it is obstructive in nature. If you were susceptible to central apnea then it should have shown up in your sleep lab test for apnea. Your lab test was mild obstructive apnea, so that suggests it is more likely obstructive apnea. But, like I say, that is just a non professional opinion.
The used of sedatives like Ambien for a sleep apnea test is not all that uncommon. If anything sedatives promote central apnea, not prevent it. So, for that reason they should have detected the central apnea in the lab test if it really is a problem.
There may well be some obstruction. Please read up on what transitional sleep apnea is. Ithink you will gain a better understanding of the struggle involving treatment. Almost every person that tried a cpap says it doesn't work. It may well be because it central or a mixed apnea. Infact one article calls it sleep onset central apnea . As for the sleep study, taking a sleeping tablet increases problems with obstructive sleep apnea but with sleep onset apnea it takes you past the struggle in the first stage of sleep. Some people on the forum complain of having to depend on sleeping pills to get any sleep at all. My technologit wasn't looking for such an apnea. She looked baffled when I asked her when did my episodes happen. I slept only four hrs that night. Seven hrs sleep was recorded on my test. Clearly either the equipment or the technologist was not up to the latest that would pick up any other apneas but obstructive. I am just hoping Someone from this forum with such an apnea shares their development as they have tried cpap and probably now moved to other options, hopefully successfully. By the way what confuses me is I thought losing weight helps obstructive sleep apnea. For me its done nothing.
I believe the technical definition of an apnea event is 10 seconds or more. However certainly less than 10 seconds can be recorded. See the example from SleepyHead below. There are three events in a row. The first is a central (CA). You can see the machine cycling the flow rapidly after about 6 seconds of no flow and there is little response on the mask pressure. That is how the machine tests to see if the airway is open or closed. In the first event the pressure response is minimal so it gets classed as a CA. The second event is classed as a obstructive apnea (OA). The flow impact on pressure is greater. Then there is a third event which you can tell is obstructive because of the pressure response, but it is not flagged because it did not last long enough. But you can still see it easily if someone is looking. That is what someone should be doing in interpreting your sleep report. But, the bottom line is that stopping breathing for a few second happens all the time to everyone. That is probably why they put a 10 second minimum before an apnea is reported. Otherwise there would be hundreds of apnea events reported in a normal person's sleep.
I need to find now a tech that has sleepyhead first n then take it from there. We all may have moment of apnea when we sleep but for the masses it doesn't wake them repeatedly keeping them up for entire nights. Armed with this information I will move forward. Cannot give up.
Sleep clinics are unlikely to have SleepyHead. However they should have manufacturer supplied software like ResMed's ResScan. They should also have somewhat similar software used for the interpretation of sleep tests and titration tests.
I’ve just started suffering from this and it has lead me here.
Noticed it 2 weeks ago. Drifting off to sleep and I woke up because i am not breathing. I wouldn’t say I’m grasping for air but I wake up confused as to why I’m not breathing, like why has my automatic breathing stopped? So I just restart my breathing manually and try to sleep again. From then on it has become very frequent. 4-6 times in a row before I manage to get to sleep and that’s like 1 hour of tossing and turning trying to get to sleep. But once I’m asleep, I’ll stay asleep no issues.
This whole thing is causing me quite abit of anxiety. My brain keeps thinking what happens if I don’t wake up the next time i stop breathing.
I’ve suspected that I’ve got sleep apnea for a while now but it’s just that in my country Malaysia, it’s not a very recognized issue and it’s quite hard to find someone who can legit diagnose it (most doctors say they can but straight up want to sell you the CPAP machine without test)
So because of this sudden onset sleep apnea I’ve found someone who specializes in sleep disorders. My appointment is on Tuesday. I used to be such a great sleeper. I just want it back. Oh how I’ve taken that for granted.
Hi Velacook Great to hear from you. I am completely sympathetic with what you are going through. In countries like ours very often we dont have the enquiring minds fron drs and sleep technicians. They always look for a slight obstruction and call it obstructive sleep apnea because its easiest. This kind of onset apnea is quiet problematic as you cant even get passed first stage of sleep so you become an insomniac. Not nice. Lets just pray your dr has an open mind and i hope to hear from you.
@Southafrican
No luck the sleep doctor was just focused on Obstructive sleep apnea. I do have OSA but that predates the onset sleep apnea problem.
I am not sure what to do now. However, I came across this post on another website :
Hey guys, I know this is an older thread but I wanted to jump on here anyway because I’m sure there are a lot of you that are still pulling this up on internet searches for the first time in desperation trying to figure out what the heck is wrong with you (like I did) and I want to offer some hope and encouragement as to what is working well with me when it comes to beating these awful symptoms.
First off, CALM DOWN, it is not heart disease or a brain tumor. 99% of it is ANXIETY. It is the common denominator for all of us that I have noticed as I myself have been reading through these various posts and website threads and this is a relatively common problem for those of us that have lived in a chronically stressed environment. Your nervous system is basically shot because you have run yourself into the ground with a combination of anxiety, exhaustion, adrenal fatigue, bad diet, and an imbalance in either nutritional/mineral deficiency and/or hormonal imbalance.
Here is what I have been dealing with myself and how I am fixing it:
My symptoms were two fold-which started manifesting themselves over the past few months and line up exactly with the dreaded sensations that we have all be desperately searching the internet trying to understand.
That awful feeling that right as you begin to fall asleep, you feel as though you forget to breathe. It’s like your brain forgets to tell your diaphragm to contract, then you get a suffocating or chest/collapsing or sinking feeling/reaction and jerk yourself awake with the awareness that you forgot to breathe. It is awful and it is scary and it leaves you in a panic because you wonder what’s wrong with you, if you’re dying, and you begin to fear the otherwise normal act of drifting off to sleep, which can then lead to a pattern of insomnia as it did with me.
The second sensation is a similar variation of the first. This is where you start to drift off to sleep, and instead of catching yourself forgetting to breathe, instead you get a surge of adrenaline that shoots through your abdomen and chest area that feels almost like an electric shock. It’s like your heart or lungs get zapped with a surge and like the first sensation, it jerks you out of the sleep cycle and sends you into a panic. You get to a point that you literally want to cry because you’re so exhausted and you cant figure out why your body seems to have forgotten how to sleep, and how to give you the one gift of peace (a good night’s sleep) that you want so badly to experience.
These sensations, when occurring over and over again whether it's you trying to take a daytime nap or trying to sleep through the night, compound over weeks and months and sink you further into fear and depression as you fret about how you must be dying or will die since you have lost the ability to even sleep correctly anymore. This also in turn further increases your anxiety cycle and keeps compounding your problem.
I personally, at the time of writing this, have been living out this nightmare myself since November of 2017 (it’s mid March 2018). But just within the past two weeks I have found some extremely helpful answers that are making dramatic improvements that I’d really like to share to help some of the rest of you.
The topics that I found in my research point overwhelmingly to adrenal fatigue and hormone imbalance as the primary cause. Now I’m not a doctor, and in fact I still have an upcoming doctors appointment in a few weeks, but it is with an integrative doctor that actually specializes in Adrenal Fatigue and hormonal imbalance.
The reason I wanted to post this now, is that even on my own research I believe I have identified at least a major part of the problem and wanted to share the improvements with all of you ASAP because I know how awful it is to be stuck in this cycle and how urgently many of you(us) are desperate for some hope immediately.
So let me lay out the steps of how I got here and how I’m now pulling out of this nonsense:
I am a 36 year old male. I have owned my own business for the past 15 years, which has been successful monetarily, but is in a very stressful industry that has taken long hours and a ton of effort to build. Last year especially I was putting in 14 hours days, not sleeping well, eating a ton of junk food, and exercise was sporadic at best.
By November of 2017 I was starting to crash. I was trying to improve my sleep, and some nights (before these horrible drifting off to sleep symptoms started showing up in late January of 2018) there were some nights where I would get 12 hours of sleep and I would still wake up exhausted and fatigued.
As I said by end of January 2018, I was starting to occasionally get these awful symptoms of “forgetting to breathe” right as I was falling asleep, or a close cousin of that symptom was the feeling of an electric shock shooting through my stomach and chest/heart area right as I would dose off. My quality of sleep started to spiral downward throughout February 2018, as I was beginning to develop an actual complex or phobia about falling asleep. By end of February I had managed to find myself with full-blown insomnia, where I was so exhausted during the day I’d have to go sit or lie down and “rest” even after completing the most simple tasks. I was mentally and physically exhausted all the time, but then when I’d try to get to bed at a decent hour, I would wrestle with these sensations sometimes until 4 and 5 in the morning until I’d finally just pass out from exhaustion and somehow “push through” this barricade of sensations that were starting to hold me hostage in my insomnia.
That is when I started learning about adrenal fatigue, and hormonal imbalances, and how they can create these problems. Also, I want to note that while I have not yet had a sleep study done, I have had my heart and other things checked out which are fine. But I don't believe this issue of forgetting to breathe or getting jerked awake right at the moment you cross into sleep is sleep apnea, because I don’t snore and I have no issues once I am actually asleep. Perhaps it could be a form of what is called “sleep onset apnea” (nothing to be feared) which is different than traditional sleep apnea which affects you all throughout the night. And what I have found is that with the right application of supplements, what I am about to tell you is that even this sleep onset sensations can go away quickly and completely!
So again, I’m not a doctor, this is my free opinion, but I am really hopeful this will be an encouragement and an answer for those of you that are still suffering from this:
Read up everything you can online about Adrenal Fatigue so you understand what is going on with your body. I found Dr. Berg’s Youtube video series to be extremely educational and it gave me a lot of hope. He discusses the nutritional deficiencies and other stress factors that can lead to and keep you stuck in a cycle of adrenal fatigue. Just get on Youtube and type in something like “Dr Berg adrenal fatigue” in your search and it will get you right where you need to go. He has several videos on this topic.
Adrenal fatigue and sleep onset apnea are both caused and intensified by deficiencies in magnesium, potassium and calcium in your body, which are required by your body to turn off the “flight or fight” anxiety response switch. When you are burned out from a chronically stressful lifestyle, your adrenals get stuck in the cycle of dumping excess cortisol into your system. My understanding is that these cortisol surges are literally the main thing that can cause those unpleasant sensations right as you are trying to drift off to sleep. The moment I started using these supplements, which I am going to go into detail about in a minute, within the first night or two those horrible sleep onset sensations reduced dramatically and by the 2-3 night they have already disappeared! I am sleeping through the night and am able to get very restful naps in during the daytime now.
Diet and nutrition are absolutely imperative if you’re going to pull yourself out of this. And it’s already the usual stuff you would expect. Cut processed foods, increase veggies, and stay away as much as possible from sugar and caffine because they are stimulates that tax your adrenals even more. Coffee, tea, chocolate, sweets, carbs…they could literally be keeping you held hostage within this awful adrenal/cortisol cycle that is ruining your quality of life.
On of Dr. Berg’s videos on Youtube, he highlights an acupressure massage tool that he developed. Be sure to check out that video. He goes over pressure points in the back of your neck as well as your abdomen that you can focus on with this massage tool right before you go to bed at night. He explains it beautifully in the sense that the neck pressure points are like the brake to slow down your stress/anxiety surging through your body, and then the pressure points in your abdomen are like taking your foot off the gas pedal by slowing down the flow of cortisol into your system. I have been doing this simple routine every night before I go to sleep and it is helping significantly in addition to the other supplements I am taking.
I ordered Dr. Berg’s acupressure massage tool, as well as his Sleep Aid natural supplement and a liquid essential mineral blend that helps restore your potassium, calcium and magnesium levels throughout the day, which in turn really help you sleep at night.
Get on amazon and check out “Cortisol Manager” supplements by a company called Integrative Therapeutics. I take two of these every night before bed. I also ordered from amazon something called “5-HTP” from a place called Arazo Nutrition. It helps regulate your brain, mood and sleep. I take two of these every night now before bed along with the Cortisol Manager, and again those two things together really help shut off the flight or fight cortisol surges that I believe could be actually creating those terrible sensations of shock or not breathing right as you are drifting off to sleep.
Also on Youtube there are relaxation videos that deal with sound frequencies. Dr Royal Rife did a ton of research on healing sound therapies back in the early 1900’s and it is legit! Do a youtube search on “Rife frequencies for insomnia” or “Rife Frequencies adrenal fatigue”, sleep apnea, whatever you want just make sure they are Rife frequencies. They have videos for just about any ailment you can think of and they are awesome including blood pressure, anxiety, even sore throat, thyroid problems, etc. So definitely check them out. Again it takes several trips through those sounds videos in some cases before you notice an effect so don't be discouraged if you listen to them once and don't feel any different. It is a cumulative effect so just stick with it.
I want to say a word about state of mind through your healing process. It took you a while to get yourself this burned out, it might take a little while to climb back out. So be patient with yourself and your body and be kind to yourself. As I mentioned at the start of my post, I have seen dramatic improvements within a few days of implementing these different supplements and protocols, but it did take a few nights for it to start taking effect. One other thing that really helped me is that I tried to stop stressing myself out by telling myself “I have GOT to sleep.” I know that’s what you need and want, but the first few nights I told myself “ok you don't HAVE to sleep, just relax.” If you just relax in the dark without putting added pressure and stress on yourself that you HAVE to sleep, its amazing how your body will come down from the stress and you will fall asleep eventually anyway.
Get back on Amazon and order the book “Hope and Healing For Your Nerves” by Dr. Claire Weeks. Chances are if you are experiencing this sleep symptoms you are probably suffering from anxiety and panic attack/nervous system issues elsewhere in your life. This book is a life saver when it comes to helping you understand what your body is going through as well as practical steps to help you pull out of this cycle of suffering.
Lastly, go to the doctor! Not because you have to freak out that you’ve got heart disease or brain tumor because you don't. But go in order to get some blood work done to check your nutritional panels and hormone levels. Again, when you have adrenal fatigue, your calcium, potassium and magnesium levels are likely very low. But for myself personally, I had/have no interest in going to a general practice family doctor. They will likely just force-feed you sleeping pills or some other nonsense prescription meant to cover up the symptoms, but which really do nothing to correct the root cause. Find an integrative doctor in your area that actually specializes in adrenal fatigue and bio identical hormone replacement therapy.
You are not dying! You’ve just worn out your nervous system. So take a deep breathe and stop worrying. It just takes a few corrective measures to get yourself back on track. You WILL get your old life and old self back even if you don't feel that way at the moment. I really hope this post can bring some relief and hope to some of you. It is definitely a miserable prison to be stuck in when you can’t quite figure out what seems to be the problem and you feel like your sleep and your health is spiraling out of control. It’s like a bad dream you can’t wake up from and you can get very depressed very quickly when you want so badly to just get your old life back. This is a blessing though. It’s a warning sign from your body that you need to start taking better care of yourself and correct some lifestyle habits now. Again, just be kind and be patient with yourself and check into these protocols I’ve outlined and that should help put you on a path out of this.
Hello Velacook. Thank you for posting all the tips. Thing is I am not stressed. Infact I feel I have been in a good place more now then ever. On this actual forum visit each page and you will come across a couple people under the heading sleep onset or transitional apnea. They have similar experiences trying the cpap but unsucessfully. Its good to see what they try but unfortunely non of them return to update their progress. I tried tracing them with no sucess. Lets always stay positive that we will find help and relief.
Hi Velacook. Please look up , if you haven't already, a writer called Lorra Garrick. She did two articles on sleep transition apnea. She writes under Scary Symptoms. I think it would be good to get a hold of her and ask her what the treatment options are. She is in contact with two Drs whom I tried to contact with no sucess. I am trying to get her on linked in. See if you can be more successful and please keep me posted. Warm regards
I just wanted to pop in and give everyone here some much needed hope by sharing my story. We all sound startingly similar because I think we're all cut from the same cloth, in terms of our propensity to worry about health.
I first started suffering from these odd transitional apneas when I was a senior in high school in 2010. Over the years they would come and go, only intensifying when my anxiety over them would increase. After noticing the correlation, I started focusing on relaxing exercises for my diaphragm (you can easily find such exercises on YouTube), as well as taking a mild homeopathic calming agent (L-Theanine, 200 mg strength). After just days of doing this, I noticed a sheer drop off in the number of transitional events (something like 10 or more to 1-4). Eventually, after conditioning my mind not to fixate on the events, accept their presence during sleep, I went years without experiencing them at all.
Fast forward to this past January, I started experiencing them again. I didn't feel overtly stressed so my mind started jumping to the worst case, like full-out Central Sleep Apnea. Would I have to live my life on a CPAP? Would I ever sleep and feel rested again? I punked myself into near-hysteria and ended up not sleeping for several days.
DO NOT MAKE MY MISTAKE. After seeing a sleep specialist, she concluded what I knew in the back of my mind: I was making a normal reacting to latent stress a lot worse than it needed to be. I explained my history to her and she nodded and agreed with me that this isn't pathological sleep apnea. If it were, I would not be able to find effective relief without serious medical intervention (e.g. a BiPap, ASV, medicine to regulate the nervous system, a diaphragm pacer, phrenic nerve stimulator, etc.). I was able to treat this obnooxious bullshit myself when I was a teenager to the point where I eliminated it from my life for years.
It turns out that transitional events can be triggered by stress. Even a little can set off a firestorm of hell, with regards to this. So I decided that I would treat it again. This is what I did:
(1) L-Theanine (200 mg increments to calm down, your needed dosage will vary)
(2) Clean diet. I eliminated anything with extra stimulants lik added sugars. Only fruits, vegetables, lean meats and oatmeal as a complex carbs source.
(3) Exercise. Exercise. EXERCISE. I know this can be a tough one on those days where you got no rest but do it anyway. Studies show that exercise greatly improved the recovery and quality of life in people with CSA. Do it. There's nothing that brings on a good sleep like falling into bed exhausted from a good run or weight lifting session.
I really do think for the most part, our common problem on here is anxiety. I don't doubt these are true transitional events but again, transitional events can be normal. We are making it worse by fixating and clinging to forums. Use this place as a support resource, but I would encourage you to not google your symptoms.
Relax. Trust that you can overcome this and don't be discouraged. It can be quite a process but you can recover and have your good quality of life and rest again.
Hello Jane. Just as a matter of curiosity, what made you come to this forum now considering your strong belief that you don't have sleep apnea?
I did some forum searches primarily because I remembered how frustrating it was for me, when I was going through it, when people would never respond after providing promising updates. I believe a part of that was because they probably didn't want to relive the frustration and trauma of going through this. They just wanted to move on. But still, when you're on the raft it's frustrating.
Hello Jane. I fully understand those feelings of frustrations. Its 14 months since I have been going through this transitional apneas. Granted that such apneas are a normal part of the sleep cycle. However mine keeps me up for nights on end. Its affecting my health adversely with blood pressure issues now and my diabetes is no longer controlled. I was forced to give up on my studies to complete an honours programme which I hope to get back to someday. If these apneas occur over an over again then its not normal and needs some intervention. That's what I have been hoping to hear about on these forums. My Dr doesn't know how to move forward because I'm classified as mild apnea but all in the transition phase. Its easier for Drs and technicians to sweep something they have no idea about by saying its STRESS RELATED. Be careful of that. You can infact have complex apneas with both obstructive and centrals. Whether your technician looks for that or your Dr has the Tim and energy to adress that is another issue. An article I read recently by a health blogger Lorra Garrick did mention that supplemental oxygen can be used in cases like this. Obviously she is conferring with pulmonlogists or sleep specialists. Their input would be valuable as they dealing with these so called " stress related apneas". Also on the forum I came across several sufferers. Their stories were about trying cpaps but on exhalation were choking. Then another person on the forum went the route of antidepressant and anti anxiety meds with no help. He/ she tried surgery to the tongue and palate also with no sucess. Question is , are these apneas not central considering those options never worked? I hope to investigate and find at least a treatment option so my health can improve.
As I think you have found in your research, sleep onset apnea is not all that uncommon. I only had to go back 11 days to find a night where I had a central apnea just after going to sleep. See the SleepyHead screenshot below. I went to bed at 1:09 AM (much later than my normal). At about 1:16 my ResMed machine decided I was asleep and started to ramp up the pressure to my normal fixed 11 cm. You can tell from the flow rate fluctuations that breathing was very regular indicating I was asleep. Then about 1:17 it appears my mask started to leak significantly. Perhaps I rolled over. The breathing indicates that I probably awoke or at least partially awoke. About 1:18 the pressure relief on exhale stopped as it should and I was then on the full fixed 11 cm, and looking like I was going back to sleep again. Except that at about 1:18:15 it looks like I stopped breathing. By 1:18:35 the machine declared this was a central apnea event that lasted 17 seconds. Regular breathing started again, and another mask leak change occurs which may mean a position change. This is followed by two more mini apnea events which did not last long enough to be counted. The pressure pulse would suggest they were central apnea. After that a regular sleep pattern followed with no events until about 2:10.
Long story, but the point you may want to consider is that the apnea event caused a minor disruption to my sleep, but it certainly did not keep me from going to sleep. My thoughts are that a critical question that you might want to ask your doctor is WHY would an apnea event prevent you from going to sleep? Apnea sufferers sleep through apnea events all the time, including ones just as they are going to sleep. So the unanswered question would be why it seems to disrupt your sleep so drastically that you can't go to sleep...
I have sent a response. Seems it didn't go through. Maybe a glitch in computer. My apologies if I repeat myself. Yes you are a hundred percent correct with your question Sierra. Makes complete sense. My perhaps limited understanding would lead me to believe for that brief one to two seconds there is a cut of of oxygen supply to the brain forcing me to wake up and breath. My concern is that 1 to 2 seconds is too short to even record. Am I correct. ?
If you look at the flow graph in the Daily report I posted you will see that every breath is recorded. When there is no breathing flow there is no upward (inhale) or no downward (exhale) change in flow. It is not uncommon at all to stop breathing for a second or two. The machine would not flag it as an apnea event, and as I said there were a couple of them in this graph that were not flagged. It only flags events that last 10 seconds or longer. But, you can still see that I stopped breathing. I am not a medical professional, but I don't see why that should cause you to wake up. Seems to me that is the real issue here. Not the apnea, but waking up.
