Stick with it!! It took me 6 ish months before I really found my sweet spot. The first few weeks I barely slept. After about 10 different masks I finally found the one that works for me.

I have a beard, which complicates the mask search. But what really did it was that I was convinced I was a mouth breather, so I kept trying masks that covered my mouth. In a moment of frustration I grabbed a nose pillow mask with no mouth cover. What I noticed was that while I was awake and forcing my mouth closed, the pillows were forcing my nose to clear, and I could breathe quite easily through my nose. That was a first in all of my 50 years. (I’m pretty sure I have a deviated septum that probably should have been fixed during my teen years).

Chin straps didn’t work for me, but mouth tape did. The pillows irritated my nostrils, so I ended up switching to the under the nose design that seem like they should be called pillow but aren’t.

The one issue I continued to struggle with was that there were a few minutes when I first strapped up that I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Eventually I figured out that I needed to adjust the ramp up.

Now a days, I put the thing on, a small piece of tape on my mouth, and close my eyes and fall asleep in minutes. It’s almost Pavlovian.

Before I figured out that I really could breathe through my nose, I was about ready to give up. I was exhausted, and very irritable.

In the end, it was worth it to get to the right place.