Sleep Apnea Gave Me Migraines—CPAP Stopped Them Overnight

Rewind to 2001. I was staying in a hostel in Sydney, exhausted from travelling, and fell asleep in a shared dorm. Sometime in the night I was woken by another guest yelling at me to stop snoring. The embarrassment was complete. I packed my things, checked into a hotel at my own expense, and spent the rest of that trip avoiding any accommodation where I’d have to sleep near strangers.

I didn’t know then that what was keeping that dorm awake was sleep apnea. I just thought I was someone who snored badly. What I didn’t connect at all — for years — was the other thing that was happening to me: the migraines.

By 2014 I was getting crushing migraines multiple times a week. Not bad headaches. Migraines that made me vomit, that required complete darkness and silence, that wiped out entire days. I’d lie in a dark room unable to move, waiting for the pain to pass, while my wife checked on me every few hours. I tried over-the-counter painkillers. They barely touched it. I had no idea what was causing them and neither, apparently, did anyone else — because nobody connected the snoring and the migraines.

My wife eventually pushed me to get a sleep study. I was sceptical about what it would show. The results changed everything.

The Diagnosis

My AHI came back at 51. That meant I was stopping breathing 51 times per hour — more than once every minute, all night, every night. My blood oxygen was dropping to 78 percent. The clinical category is severe.

Suddenly the migraines made complete sense.

Each time my breathing stopped, my brain wasn’t getting the oxygen it needed. Blood vessels dilated. Carbon dioxide accumulated. Inflammation fired. Do that fifty-one times an hour across seven or eight hours of sleep and you wake up with a head that’s been through a physiological crisis hundreds of times in the night. The pain I’d been attributing to bad luck or bad genetics was my brain communicating what my body had been doing while I was unconscious.

I’d been a loud snorer since my twenties. The migraines didn’t start until later and then escalated over years. Looking back, I can trace the progression: the sleep apnea was worsening over time, the oxygen deprivation accumulating, and the migraines getting more frequent and more severe as a direct consequence. Nobody made that connection. Not my GPs, not me.

The First Night With CPAP

The machine arrived and I looked at the mask and thought: how am I going to sleep in this for the rest of my life?

The first night was rough. I was using the ResMed F20 full face mask with the AirSense 10, and the pressure felt like a tornado blowing into my face. I pulled the mask off. Put it back on. Managed some fitful sleep. When I woke up I noticed something uncomfortable — my heart felt strained, like it had been working too hard all night. I went back to the sleep clinic and described it. They adjusted the pressure settings down.

That second night was completely different. Comfortable enough that I slept through it. And when I woke up the following morning, something was absent that I hadn’t woken up without in years.

There was no headache.

Not a mild one. Not one that hadn’t developed yet. Nothing. I lay there waiting for the familiar throb to start. It didn’t. My head felt normal — a sensation so unfamiliar that it took me a moment to process what I was experiencing.

My AHI data showed under 4. From 51 to under 4 in one night. With my airways held open by the machine, oxygen was reaching my brain properly for the first time in years. And without the overnight oxygen deprivation, there was nothing to trigger the migraines.

Ten Years Without One

That was in 2014. I haven’t had a single one of those crushing migraines since.

Not one. In ten years.

I use my ResMed AirSense 10 and F20 mask every night without exception. My AHI sits consistently between 1 and 4. I check the myAir app every morning and my scores are reliably good. The machine has become as unremarkable a part of my bedtime routine as brushing my teeth — something I do without thinking about, that I couldn’t imagine not doing.

The contrast with the years before is still striking when I think about it. Multiple days a week lost to lying in darkness, plans cancelled, quality of life hollowed out by a condition nobody had identified. Now: nothing. Normal mornings, normal days, no fear of a migraine arriving unexpectedly.

It bears saying that my response was unusually immediate. Most people report gradual improvement over weeks or months rather than resolution on day one. The likely reason mine stopped so abruptly is that oxygen deprivation was the sole driver of my migraines — no other contributing factors, no partial causes. Once the oxygen was restored, the trigger was gone. If your migraines have multiple causes, improvement may come more slowly but is still likely.

Why This Connection Gets Missed

Research published in the journal Headache has documented the relationship between sleep apnea and morning headache for years — the mechanism is well understood. Repeated hypoxia causes vasodilation in the brain’s blood vessels, carbon dioxide accumulates during apnea events, and the combined effect produces the characteristic morning headache that presents in sleep apnea patients. In severe cases this escalates to migraine.

And yet in my experience it took years of escalating migraines before anyone suggested a sleep study. Part of this is that the connection isn’t obvious — snoring happens at night and migraines happen in the morning, and unless someone specifically looks for the pattern, the two don’t naturally present as related. Part of it is that migraine is attributed to many causes, and a busy GP appointment doesn’t always probe for sleep disorders.

The American Migraine Foundation notes that sleep disorders including sleep apnea are significantly associated with migraine and that treating the underlying sleep disorder can substantially reduce migraine frequency. This is well-established in the headache medicine literature. It just doesn’t always filter through to the point where someone with morning migraines and a partner who snores gets told to get a sleep study.

What to Do If This Sounds Familiar

If you’re waking up with headaches or migraines most mornings, and you or someone you sleep with has noticed loud snoring, witnessed breathing pauses, or the gasping and choking that characterises sleep apnea — please get tested before you try anything else for the migraines.

A home sleep test will tell you within days whether you have sleep apnea and how severe it is. It’s done in your own bed, requires no clinic visit, and the results are clinically valid. If the test confirms sleep apnea, treating it is the intervention most likely to address the migraines — and in many cases, as in mine, it’s the only intervention needed.

The other symptoms that accompany sleep apnea — the exhaustion that doesn’t improve with sleep, the difficulty concentrating, the blood pressure that creeps up, the motorway near-misses from daytime sleepiness — all of those matter too. But for someone whose primary complaint is morning migraines, I want to be specific: the connection is real, the mechanism is understood, and the treatment works.

I suffered through years of those migraines because nobody connected the dots. If reading this helps someone make that connection earlier than I did, it’s the most useful thing this page will do.

⚠️ MEDICAL DISCLAIMER This blog provides general information only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Sleep apnea is a serious condition, and CPAP equipment should be used under proper medical supervision. Always consult your doctor or sleep specialist before starting, stopping, or changing any therapy. I share personal experiences as a CPAP user, not as a medical professional. Individual results vary. For medical guidance, please consult a qualified clinician or the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (aasm.org).