Wake up in the middle of the night and find you can’t breathe or haven’t been breathing? In fact, the startling nature of suddenly awakening with stopped breathing can send an alarmed person bolting out of bed, heaving deep breaths to catch up on lost breaths. When you awaken and find you haven’t been breathing, what does this really mean?
Good news: It means pretty much nothing. I don’t know if there’s a name for this phenomenon, but I DO know that it’s not uncommon. If you suffer from episodes of waking in the middle of the night struggling to breathe, I bet that in 99 percent of all stopped-breathing episodes, you are lying on your BACK. How often does stopped breathing happen when you’re on your side? Does waking and struggling to breathe ever happen at all while you’re lying on your stomach? There’s a good reason for this.
When on your back, drifting off to sleep, breathing becomes very relaxed. Adding to the effect is the fact that gravity is bearing down on the stomach. The result is that breathing becomes TOO relaxed, with gravity pressing down, body falling asleep. At some point, your stomach fails to rise for the next breath. You’re now not breathing.
But don’t fear, because the body has a mechanism that detects when breathing stops. When it detects a person has not been breathing, it will awaken that individual. I don’t know how long it takes this detection device to sound the alarm, but it isn’t long. The individual awakens with a jolt (this means your body is working right).
But the shock and startling nature creates a panic, and as a result, you start gasping, bug-eyed. You now perceive the sensation of not being able to breathe, versus what has actually happened: You stopped breathing for a few moments; your breath was merely held.
When you consciously hold your breath to swim under water, and then surface, do you gasp and struggle? No, because you know exactly what happened; the stopped breathing was done consciously.
But when it happens while you’re asleep, you’re not aware of its process until the very end of it, when you are oxygen-deprived and suddenly awaken. Panic strikes.
Stress and anxiety over this will cause episodes of stopped breathing to occur more frequently. So may anxiety over unrelated issues. But now that you know what the cause is, stopped breathing should not occur as often anymore. Also, sleep on your side. Gravity doesn’t have the effect of pressing down on your abdomen as much.
This is NOT sleep apnea. In sleep apnea, the person doesn’t awaken when their breathing stops. This is why a person never knows he has sleep apnea based solely on night-time breathing patterns. He instead finds out from his bed partner who reports choking sounds and heavy snoring. Another way the victim learns he has sleep apnea is through its daytime symptoms: morning headaches, excessive drowsiness, fatigue, trouble concentrating, and in more severe cases, heart troubles.
Only a sleep monitoring machine (which tracks oxygen consumption) can rule in or out sleep apnea.
