jimmyh wrote:I have sleep apnea, which makes me aware of just how unaware we can be of the quality of our sleep. So let's all be careful out there.
Robert
I'd be interested in hearing more if you care to expand
Cheers,
Jimmy
You can see my writeup at
http://www.plamondon.com/wp/slept-sleep-apnea/, but, basically, sleep apnea (and snoring, for that matter) happen when one is pretty deeply unconscious -- so unconscious that whatever part of the mind is active isn't even managing the body's breathing adequately. (With sleep apnea, one's airway relaxes to the point of interfering with breathing, with all the fun effects that come from not being able to breathe properly. But since it happens only during deep sleep, you don't notice.)
It's possible that this can be addressed through hypnosis, but it's hard for me to monitor myself when I'm asleep.
I have a plan for doing this but haven't implemented it yet. The instrumentation on my sleep apnea machine lets me look back over the previous night and see how I did. With an automatic CPAP machine like mine, if it sees that I'm not breathing, it'll crank up the air pressure until I can inhale again. If hypnotic suggestion works, I'll start seeing fewer of these.
All well and good, but I've cranked up the minimum pressure to the point where I don't HAVE any apnea events, and so the record shows nothing. The word on the street is that this gives better sleep quality than trusting the (somewhat sluggish) automatic function.
So far, I haven't worked up much enthusiasm about dialing down the minimum pressure so I can play with suggestions, but that's how I'd do it. Maybe a week or two of baseline, then self-hypnosis sessions plus recordings that repeated all night, changing approaches a few times if I weren't getting the results I want.
For anything other than altering the deepest phases of sleep, I'd have more confidence, especially with self-hypnosis recordings that ran all night, reminding the mind in various phases of sleep what is being requested of it.
Robert