How I measure sleep quality

[martyedb]

May I  ask?     Why fewer bathroom trips?
I have fewer bathroom trips, too,  which is good.     
When I wake up to go to bathroom,   I have to decide whether to take off the mask.     If I'm having leaks anyway,  or if my mouth feels really dry,  I take it off.    Then, since mask is off,  I will have a few sips of water  from travel  mug by the sink.   And put artificial tears in my eyes.   Those two things feel really good,  but then...   I'm   (frequently)  awake.    AWAKE.    After all,  I've already slept a few hours.    (Is it morning yet?)  
Actually,  since receiving help from  my  "panel of experts" on Apnea Board,   I'm doing better.    The soft cervical collar is decreasing the OA s  and helping keep my mouth closed, so mouth less dry.   The additional positional therapy suggestion of tennis ball on my back helps  me sleep on my sides.     Pressures are decreased since earlier in my CPAP therapy...and FEWER LEAKS.   YAY!   
Other measures of sleep quality:
I don't cry over things that are NOTHING, like forgetting to return SIM card to CPAP machine.
I'm less easily frustrated--my husband doesn't have to encourage me to go out and watch for hummingbirds.  (and our hummingbirds have left.)
I'm less irritable--my husband asked, "you've been irritable?"   (Thank you, God, for zipper on my lips.)
I am thankful for better sleep.
And thank you for sharing your measures of sleep quality.

[slowriter]

Fewer (or better, no) bathroom trips also, more importantly, suggests you are getting deep sleep, during which (I forget the precise details, but) basically your body retains water.

Since switching to and optimizing PAP therapy, I almost never wake up for a bathroom trip.

[Dormeo]

Here's some information about nocturia and apnea, from the American Sleep Apnea Association:

"How does apnea cause nocturia? Umlauf explains that during episodes of sleep apnea, the soft structures in the throat relax and close off the airway, setting into motion a chain of physiological events. “Oxygen decreases, carbon dioxide increases, the blood become more acidic, the heart rate drops and blood vessels in the lung constrict,” says Umlauf. “The body is alerted that something is very wrong. The sleeper must wake enough to reopen the airway. By this time, the heart is racing and experiences a false signal of fluid overload. The heart excretes a hormone-like protein that tells the body to get rid of sodium and water, resulting in nocturia.”"

[mesenteria]

When we are young, and mostly when all of us are awake, our pituitary glands minimize a hormone known as ADH (anti-diuretic hormone).  When we are young, and mostly asleep, our production of ADH rises so that we DON'T awaken and have that function interfere with proper rest.  Unfortunately, many of us are no longer young, and we don't produce nearly enough ADH when we fall asleep.  So, and probably because our older sleep quality sucks anyway, and few of us get more than maybe 6 hours of sleep total per night, we get that double whammy of low ADH production and more wakefulness which gang up on us and make us have to rise once, twice, and for some, like my 90-year-old father, four and five times a night.

A day doesn't go by but when I thank my Creator for whatever he/she/they has bestowed on me in the way of genetics.  My siblings have to rise at least twice, but I...do not.  Not even once.  It helps that I stop drinking anything except maybe a half-glass of water during the evening meal, which in our case is near 1800 hours.  By bedtime, in my case 0030 hrs, I'm pretty well wrung dry, and then I go to sleep for six hours.  No wonder I don't seem to have to void. 

Your eyesight gets poorer as you age as well.  It means that a great many of us stub our toes or fall over things we can't see.  Rising in the middle of the night is dangerous if one is careless about what one leaves scattered around the house, or if one is in a great rush to get to the john.  

And then there's that sense of balance....

[DaveL]

When we are young, and mostly when all of us are awake, our pituitary glands minimize a hormone known as ADH (anti-diuretic hormone).  When we are young, and mostly asleep, our production of ADH rises so that we DON'T awaken and have that function interfere with proper rest.  Unfortunately, many of us are no longer young, and we don't produce nearly enough ADH when we fall asleep.  So, and probably because our older sleep quality sucks anyway, and few of us get more than maybe 6 hours of sleep total per night, we get that double whammy of low ADH production and more wakefulness which gang up on us and make us have to rise once, twice, and for some, like my 90-year-old father, four and five times a night.

A day doesn't go by but when I thank my Creator for whatever he/she/they has bestowed on me in the way of genetics.  My siblings have to rise at least twice, but I...do not.  Not even once.  It helps that I stop drinking anything except maybe a half-glass of water during the evening meal, which in our case is near 1800 hours.  By bedtime, in my case 0030 hrs, I'm pretty well wrung dry, and then I go to sleep for six hours.  No wonder I don't seem to have to void. 

Your eyesight gets poorer as you age as well.  It means that a great many of us stub our toes or fall over things we can't see.  Rising in the middle of the night is dangerous if one is careless about what one leaves scattered around the house, or if one is in a great rush to get to the john.  

And then there's that sense of balance....

Wonderful post mesenteria!

I'm 74 and counting. I watch other seniors walking during the day and wonder if they stoop over so they can see thru the top of their glasses that way, because they have bifocals or even trifocals.

Just a thought...so balance is off.

And I have cataracts forming. So I don't see as well; seem to need more light to see as well.

Dave

[mesenteria]

Dave, you need more light for two reasons, but due to one cause:  your pupils no longer dilate as wide as they did when you were south of 30.  This causes two problems, but might improve one other problem.  Yeah, it's complicated, but I'll try to be concise, something that usually escapes me. 

The wider the aperture of an optical system, the greater the resolution between two tiny dots or objects, or details, that are very close together and hard to see.  When we are very young, our pupils dilate readily in darkness and we see much better than the aged person holding our hands and feeling his way in the dark...attempting to lead us.  We see finer details as a result of that greater dilation, but we also get more photons incident on the fovea and the rods around them.  The fovea is the daytime colour and details part of the eye directly behind the lens and the iris...the pupil.  In darkness, our rods take over and show faint things, but not clearly, and they do much better with movement.  So, the smaller pupils of the aged reduce the eye's ability to see details because of poorer resolution, but the lesser density of photons that can get through also means a dimmer image.  A double-whammy.

I said there might be a benefit.  This is strictly technical, but it pertains to astigmatism.  For those with astigmatism, the smaller aperture in the aged eye means a slight reduction in astigmatism because the smaller aperture occludes some of the defective cornea and lens surface.  It cuts it off by shrinking the pupil under it.  Fact is, one is not likely to notice at all, particularly when hopping around one one foot, holding the other, and trying not to say words little Suzy should not hear. 

[weiss27md]

How I feel in the morning is a good gauge for how I sleep because it usually correlates closely with my fitness tracker. I use a Garmin but there are better ones. Fitbit, Polar and Oura ring. You can also use HRV as a gauge for how well you slept.

[martyedb]

What is HRV?
And thank you all , for all the information! And it's nice to know there are physical reasons for fewer nighttime bathroom trips.
And speaking of diuretic effects-- COLD does work as a diuretic--for example, standing in the cold at a bus stop.

[weiss27md]

HRV is heart rate variability. Having to urinate at night, nocturia, has many causes. Sleep disruption can cause more frequent urination.