I have been having sleep problems for at least 3 years now. It was about two years ago when I realized that my tiredness wansn't 'just normal'.

The first thing I did was going to the doctor to get my blood tested. According to him, there was nothing out of the ordinary, except for my vitamin D levels which were a little low. So he prescribed me vitamin D pills, I took them, noting changed.

Next, I went to a sleep lab where they would measure all my body functions while I was sleeping. The results showed that the quantity of my sleep was good (I didn't wake up too much) but my sleep quality was really poor. If I remember correctly, my REM sleep was good (there was enough), and my 'deep sleep' (not sure if I translated correctly) was almost nonexistent. My 'score' for sleep apnea was higher than the average person, but not really that high. According to the doctors, my poor sleep quality could not be explained by my apnea.

So the doctors couldn't really find a cause for my sleeping problem, but they did ask me wether I was depressed or had a lot of stress.

For the past three years, there have been times when I was depressed, but there have also been a lot of times where I wasnt. Now about stress. I have pretty bad social anxiety (perhaps powered by my tiredness) which gives me a lot of stress on a daily basis. BUT the reason I think I can exclude stress as a possible cause for my bad sleep is the fact that during exams and summer vacation (I'm 19 and going to university) I sleep just as bad, even though I'm not stressed out by my social anxiety.

Almost a year passed and I slept around 11-12h daily. Til this day (even though it's a little bit better now), this is the amount of sleep I need to be 'okay'. Even with this rediculous amount of sleep, I still could't stay awake during class and I still couldn't lift propperly (really low energy in the gym.

A couple of months ago I thought I found the cause. I have a pretty small nose and pretty small sinusses, so I can't really breathe propperly through them. This causes me to breath through my mouth when I sleep, and I thougt this could be the thing that prevented me from getting good sleep. So I went to a specialized doctor, who told me breathing through my mouth was not a problem. I told him more about my sleeping problem, and the results I got from the sleeping lab, and he told me the my apnea could be worse enough to explain my poor sleep.

He then proceeded to look in my throat, to see if the space between the back of my tongue and throat was wide enough to breath propperly. He found it to be pretty small, so he proposed to do some kind of test (I forgot the name) where they would put me to sleep (because the tongue muscle relaxes and falls back when you sleep) and look through a camera if there was enough space behind my tongue to breathe propperly.

Before the test he told me that if my tongue relaxed and fell back too much during my sleep, it could partially/completely block the airway and cause apnea. He also told me that if this was the case, I could be helped by a very promising product that was recently invented. This product was designed by a dentist and works like this: it consists of two retainers (sort of), one for your upper row and one for you lower row of teeth, that work together to push your lower jaw (and thus also your tongue) forward, creating more space behind your tongue to breathe. He also told me that the device worked in 80% of the cases.

They put me to sleep, and when I woke up the doctor told me that there was a very high chance this device could help me. I was super excited because I thougt I would finally be able to fix my problem. So I went to this specialized dentist to get this device custom made (price was around $900).

This was around 2 months ago. One month ago, the device was made and I have worn it since then, but little to nothing has changed. I still sleep around 11h each night unless I set an alarm and force myself to get out of bed.

I really don't know what to do next. I'm currently lying to my parents about how much better I feel, because I'm too afraid to tell them their $900 i'nvestment doesn't really work (yet).

Any suggestions or questions are very much appreciated