Wake ups in REM - Trying to Solve

published by gclemmer on Fri, 06/29/2012 - 12:09
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It seems I wake up with nearly every REM cycle for 5-45 minutes. Over the past 4 years I've suffered from chronic sleepiness, was diagnosed with mild sleep apnea, got my turbinates reduced and apparently cured. But -- still experience 10 wake ups a night and mostly in REM. It is not due to apneas. My sleep doc casually mentioned the REM wake up issue this but said I'm fine -- but here's the problem...though I don't feel fine -- I feel debilitating sleepy. Hence the Zeo.

Today is day 2 with the zeo and it has confirmed what my doc said. Yep, waking up during REM. So I'm trying new things. On night one I had 3 rem cycles all with big wake ups in the middle of them. 

Did some research and am investigating the idea that I might have rem sleep behavior disorder; however, I do not act out my dreams or show that I'm dreaming in anyway. But clearly I don't experience the 'rem paralysis' a normal sleeper does. For rem sbd, experts have suggested that melatonin might help increase rem. Took 3 mg of melatonin last night and it did help. I got 30 minutes more of rem. Had five rem cycles and one that was uninterrupted. I do feel slightly more rested today. So I'm considering that a win, even though I still woke up ten times. One team of researchers concluded that it took a week of melatonin at 3 mg to begin to correct rem wake ups. So I'm going to continue taking the melatonin this week.

If anyone suffers from rem wake ups, give a shout out. I will keep posting my progress if anyone is interested. Other ideas to experiment with are bright light therapy, breathing oriented yoga, ambien, lunesta, increasing magnesium.

GC

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Chris Lloyd

Sat, 06/30/2012 - 17:02

Magnesium has helped me.  Not so much from the REM portion, but preventing cramps that used to wake me up.

Black out curtains helped a bit.  If I did wake up, I didn't necessarily think that it was morning and wake up even more (if that makes sense).

What really helped is when I realized I was very nervous about oversleeping.  I reassured myself that I wasn't and made sure my alarm clock was set.  Then if I did wake up, for any reason, I told myself I wasn't moving or checking the clock until I heard the alarm go off.  It got my body out of the habit of jumping up all the time in sleep.  Helped out quite a bit, my wake time is often in single digits now.

Love  to hear what you come up with.

 

gclemmer

Mon, 07/02/2012 - 10:44

Last night was night 4 of a 7 night experiment using melotonin 3g. It definately has helped improve rem sleep. baseline was 21% and consistently with melotonin it is around 25%. I also feel more rested. However, it has not affected wakes up during rem at all (1 woke up 12 times last night-all during rem). It's supposed to be night 5 of the study tonight but I really want to try and ambien 10 mg and see if it minimizes wakeups. Keep you posted.