Note: This file has moved to notablog.
...I have gotten older, stopped exercising nearly as much (due to a knee injury), become much more sensitive to caffeine, and been diagnosed with sleep apnea.
"Sleep apnea" means your AIRWAY COLLAPSES and you STOP BREATHING while asleep and it is a serious, serious problem. Not only are you tired and miserable all the time, you're fatigued and in poor mental shape, in danger of making dangerous mistakes. On top of all of this, the apnea itself is very bad for your heart.
Unfortunately, apnea can also be a hard problem to get medical help with. You have to take responsibility for your own health, take the initiative and figure out if you have the symptoms, then talk to your doctor and get a sleep study done. This can be really hard to do, particularly because you feel like shit all the time, and because you have people telling you it's your own damn fault for being lazy, or being overweight. So in addition to the fatigue, you have your own feelings of inadequacy preventing you from being aggressive about solving the problem.
Getting your doctor to prescribe a sleep study can be difficult:
You may have to push your doctor to prescribe you for a "sleep study". This is a study where they wire you up and record your sleep patterns. This the only way to determine for certain whether or not you have sleep apnea, though of course there are a number of symptoms you can look for.
The canonical solution for sleep problems is a CPAP or BiPAP, both of which are essentially a mask you wear over your nose that pumps air into you, so your breathing passage doesn't collapse. Unfortunately, it's not always easy to get used to. I'm having a lot of problems getting any use out of the thing - I find it very uncomfortable, and I find it difficult to get to sleep on my back.
An acquaintance who also has sleep apnea has suggested to me that one of the reasons I'm having so much trouble getting used to this CPAP is because it sucks. A CPAP maintains a steady air pressure on your breathing system. It's sort of like trying to breathe with your head stuck out a car window travelling fast. What they should have given me was a BiPAP - a more sophisticated version of a CPAP that has a pressure sensor and software. The BiPAP detects the back-pressure when you start to breathe out, and instantly drops the pressure for a moment, to give you time to breathe out. BiPAPs are also much more expensive. My acquaintance told me he had to pester the doctor into prescribing one for him, but that it was like night and day.
Another thing that may help is sleeping on your side. I tried sleeping on my side and found it difficult to do. Then the other week I managed to fall asleep on my side on a couch (it's a long story) and I found it so refreshing that I went out and bought a hundred bucks worth of pillows, and managed to figure out an arrangement that made me more-or-less comfortable sleeping on my side. It's helped a lot. I'm going to take another crack at the CPAP now, while sleeping on my side, and see if it helps. I'm considering looking into a tempurpedic mattress, but those suckers are really expensive.
I did a lot of reading and research, read the Consumer Reports articles on mattresses, checked the google newsgroups and saw what other people said. The newsgroups lead me to healthyfoundations.com. So far I'm pretty damn impressed by these folks, their site definitely has a no-bullshit feel to it, and most of the newsgroup posts I've read have nothing but good things to say about them. They have an "isotonic" mattress that looks like it might actually be "almost as good and only two-thirds the price" as a tempurpedic.
They also have isotonic and tempurpedic mattress pads. I have a tempurpedic pillow which I really like, and I'd love a tempurpedic mattress, but I just can't make myself throw down $1900 on a bed I've never slept in. In the past I've been kind of skeptical about mattress pads. However, I've been doing a bit of bed research, and from what I can find (also confirmed, to a degree, by the FAQ at healthyfoundations.com) the padding on top of the bed is just as important as the springs inside it. The flip side of this is that getting just a mattress pad and putting it on top of an existing, basically sound bed, might really improve things.
Also, the mattress pads are a fraction of the cost of the whole mattress, so in fact it might be well worth trying out a mattress pad, if I can't afford to just buy the whole mattress... and since a really good mattress can start at $800-900, and I don't have $1900 to just buy a tempurpedic mattress on impulse, maybe it makes sense to try out a mattress pad first.
The isotonic mattress pad was part of what got me thinking about this, I guess it's $150 price tag is below my "twitch level". Once I decided it was worth a shot, I thought about ordering a tempurpedic mattress pad, after all, why take a chance with an unknown material if the material I know, and know that I like, is only $50 more? But the prices I could find were well over two or maybe three times as expensive (over $400), so I've ordered their 2" isotonic mattress pad, and we'll see if that helps as well.
Update: the healthyfoundations.com isotonic mattress pad showed up. I was quite impressed by it, it helped a lot, but I still felt a bit of pressure building up on my hip and shoulder when I'm lying on my side. So I ordered a second one. Actually, I ordered two - one as a gift for somebody. I tried it out with all three pads and that really solved the problem. So I really need to order one or two more, but at this point I'm convinced enough to buy the whole istonic bed, which I will do.
And, of course, it's a really good idea to eliminate any other factors that may be interfering, like caffeine!.
I'm not sure why I'm so much more sensitive to caffeine these days - maybe it's age, maybe it's that I just get a lot more caffeine these days than in the old days (I hardly ever touched coffee before I turned 28), maybe it's simply that due to the other problems, I'm a lot closer to the red line, and the caffeine is just pushing me over the brink.
Regardless, I've found that where caffeine is concerned, TIMING is as important, or more important, than amount. I find that I'm much happier if I consume all of my caffeine around 9am, so when it wears off approximately fifteen hours late (around midnight) and I'm just ready to go to bed, I find myself getting sleepy as well as tired. I relax into a restful state. I go to sleep easier. When I drink caffeine later in the day, I find myself tense and tired, but not sleepy, so I just lie there feeling restless and tired.
I also find that on the odd occasions when I drink caffeine later in the day, and hence go to bed caffeinated, that I tend to clench my teeth while asleep or semi-conscious, and I end up biting my tongue. This is, of course, a vicious circle; the more caffeine and screws up my sleep, the more I think I need caffeine to keep me going. And when I beat caffeine, apnea gets me...