Depending on what’s going on, have your iron levels checked as well. I was tired all of the time and two doctors diagnosed sleep apnea and put me on a cpap. Didn’t help. I had to take hour long naps every day.

A friend of my wife suggested a doctor and he said that even though my iron levels were in the normal range, people with restless leg syndrome (which I’ve had my whole life) often have sleep issues and benefit from iron supplements.

Within days of starting taking them my tiredness went away. I went from being tired every day for nearly two years to maybe taking a handful of naps for fun in the last three years. Really life changing.

My PCP didn’t understand why I’d be taking iron, but accepts that it works. My sleep charts still aren’t great. Little to no deep sleep, but CPAP didn’t help with that either.

You should consider getting an Wellue O2 ring. This is something you can use to monitor your oxygen saturation throughout the night. Use it with the CPAP and also otherwise. If your oxygen saturation is better with CPAP - you know that it is working. You will eventually feel better.

The main thing about CPAP is that, and imo almost everyone gets wrong, is that you need to titrate it. CPAP is sold as an Automatic Pressure device, but in practice it doesnt work like that. You almost always need to set it just 1 number below and 1 above your required pressure - more like a fixed pressure device. And getting it working correctly - with all the mask combinations, leaking issues, pressure calliberation, supporting gear like mouth tapes and neck bands - can take months. It is incredibly hard - BUT - it is worth it. The best resource for me has been the reddit to get this right.

The key is to track your saturation everyday with all the small tweaks you make and the only way to do it is using something like the O2 ring.

For some people it takes months to feel any different.

For some people, they don't feel any better but it improves their health.

Did you examine your numbers at all in something like OSCAR? You could get a good idea of how many events you were having at night, and if the CPAP was improving it.

Even if you aren't feeling any better (yet) it could still be helping. You could also have multiple things that are causing you fatigue issues, and maybe fixing only one of them wasn't enough... that doesn't mean that one wasn't also important, though.

I think one problem is that a lot of sleep doctors are essentially CPAP salespeople and they will just keep pushing that even if you protest that you don't feel any better. I got better answers from an ENT doc who did a Drug-Induced Sleep Endoscopy and told me mechanically why I was not breathing well at night.

I didn’t have apnea but I had UARS, which works differently. It’s more difficult to diagnose, primarily because it’s more rare.

exactly the same for me (but I gave after 5 weeks, because I didnt felt any different and hated everything about sleeping with the cpap)

If you truly have sleep apnea it’s not just about feeling refreshed. There could be other reasons you’re tired.

But sleep apnea is really bad for your heart and lungs and does damage to them over time.

Three more things to try if you haven’t, on a “can’t hurt” basis: nightly Avamys spray (might need a scrip depending on where you are), magnesium glycinate before bed, little bits of plastic that go inside the nostril and hold them open.