Comment by tombert
1 year ago
I was diagnosed with sleep apnea about six months ago. Once I started getting treatment for it (losing weight, cutting out caffeine, and an oral appliance) my life started getting dramatically better.
I had never taken sleep very seriously prior to that and I feel extremely foolish for it. Life is 100x better if you get an appropriate amount of sleep. Everything becomes a little easier.
How did you recognize that it was sleep apnea? Have you snored at night?
You have dedicated facilities who let you sleep there and monitor you. But apnea can be easily seen, the person has gaps in breathing during some parts of sleep, gasping. Snoring can be one of the symptoms but reverse is not automatically true.
My boss was diagnosed with apnea in his 30s. It was so bad they didn't believe his first test results and had to redo it, off the charts. According to him it literally killed his father. Once he started using the device for sleeping he had 100x more mental and physical energy, everything was just easier.
I was snoring, and in my case my wife told me there would be moments of kind of disturbing moments where I would stop breathing and then gasp multiple times a night.
In my case, I was able to take a sleep test from a doctor which was basically just a pulse oximeter I wore while sleeping.