I found it would typically take 5-10 minutes to fall asleep. The one thing I did notice, that was really weird, is that as I fell asleep I'd have trouble "remembering to breath". Which was quite a strange experience.
I once got woken up by a security guard in the casino as I was taking my 35 nap sitting up and I found when I just said the phrase "medical reasons" he backed off.
> The one thing I did notice, that was really weird, is that as I fell asleep I'd have trouble "remembering to breath". Which was quite a strange experience.
Have you considered getting tested for sleep apnea?
Having had similar issues, "forgetting to breathe" usually gets diagnosed as central sleep apnea, which is usually associated with heroin abuse or heart failure. In my case neither was true, so docs generally threw their hands up and said "huh, weird!".
In addition, the therapy they recommended (bi-pap or something like that, basically a two-way assisted breathing machine) did absolutely nothing for me.
What finally helped was a min dose of an SSRI, which I started for totally unrelated reasons. Guess it was anxiety, never got any confirmation from any doctor that this is a known presentation of it, but swear to God literally two days on the stuff made me sleep easy with no breathing problems whatsoever. After six months I got off and once the withdrawal symptoms broke (real bad in my case, which is super weird for a min dose, but :shrug:) I've never had the problem again.
As one falls asleep one loses the ability to voluntary breath. This can cause sensations of suffocating and resulting in panic if experienced when still conscious.
Yep, bi-pap is the intermediate machine that insurance protocols force you to try and fail on before they’ll approve the machine that actually works for your condition: ASV (Adaptive Servo Ventilation). It’s crazy expensive if you buy it new, especially if through a DME vendor. But you can buy them used with minimal hours on them for $900 or so, which is what I did. It actually works for me.
I once got woken up by a security guard in the casino as I was taking my 35 nap sitting up and I found when I just said the phrase "medical reasons" he backed off.