A little confused - sleep debt

[herbm]

I think it is perfectly natural to want sleep more when getting really comfortable sleep.

It may or may not be the norm, but good sleep FEELS GOOD and who wouldn't want that.

[archangle]

There is no such thing as sleep debt. What you are experiencing is a normal process of the body relearning how to have a "normal" sleep pattern - it takes a while for the body to find the correct equilibrium to our genetically programmed sleep pattern (actually, it never does find it - our modern world forbids what our hard wired sleep pattern should be, alas - it is not normal to sleep a straight six or eight hour sleep per night - that is something imposed on us by the Industrial revolution and electric lights, etc. Prior to that, we slept in two phases, with a relatively active wakefulness phase in between). Sleep debt itself is a myth and has no basis in science.

Let the flame war begin

I think there's a bit of a question of semantics here. Whether it's the classic "sleep debt" or not, a lot of new CPAP'ers have something that sort of acts like sleep debt.

My theory: I suspect there may be some chemical basis as well. Your body may have gotten used to spurts of adrenaline and other hormones when you get strangled during the night, you probably adjust various things in your body chemistry to adapt to O2 deprivation. The adjustments your body made to apnea may leave you out of equilibrium for a while. It's sort of like withdrawal from caffeine, nicotine, alcohol or other long term drugs.

However you say it though, some new CPAP'ers who are no longer having apnea during the night may feel tired or want a lot of sleep for a while. This effect usually goes away fairly quickly.

You do need to be sure that it's not something wrong with your therapy. A few hours in the sleep lab may not give the right settings to completely fix your apnea in the home, and your therapy may need adjustment. Yet another reason everyone needs a fully data capable CPAP machine and needs to check their AHI and other therapy data to look for problems.

I think a lot of sleep professionals are unaware that many CPAP'ers have this initial "apnea hangover" effect. We probably have a fair number of CPAP'ers who quit because of feeling tired or sleepy despite CPAP. I wish there was some way to get the word to the correct people.