I've gotten way better at the didge. My circular breathing often keeps the drone going solid, not even a brief gap, my sniffs are shorter and rarer, and after my previous longest drones being a few 2-minuters, I managed a 4.5 minute drone this morning! I'm now limited by lip tiredness instead of air.

But my apnea has still been bad. I haven't had a low-apnea night for over a week. Sigh. But maybe long drones are a pre-requisite for being able to exercise my airway enough to make a difference. It's only been a couple weeks since I picked it back up, and the study was 4 months, so I guess I shouldn't expect results so quickly.

Anyway, didge is kinda fun.

I'm going to start playing the didge again. Anything to get better sleep. I seem to have gotten better while not doing it, as often seems to be the case w/ physical skills. My circular breathing is pretty good - I can keep it up for over a minute, until my lips start to hurt, although my in-breaths sometimes result in brief breaks in the drone. But some of my in-breaths are done w/ a continuous drone.

My in-breaths are really small, I seem to have to do them more often than in the videos, I think I get less air due to weak lungs and/or my constricted, apnea-prone airway. Or maybe it's just a matter of practice.

My plan is to stop when I have a sleep study scheduled, for a couple weeks before the study. This will serve two purposes: first, as data about whether it's actually helping (a washout period). Second, to make my apnea look worse (or to put it in a fairer way, to make it accurately reflect the performance of my non-didge-exercised airway), so I can explore further surgical options, which would be preferable to needing to practice the didge daily for decades to come.

I went looking for sources of info beyond the original study - ideally people who have actually tried the didge for apnea. Found very little, but I did find this entertaining video about the study. "And now, a television first. Didgeridoo playing as seen...from the inside!" (through a bronchoscope). As I suspected, circular breathing is part of the key - it exercises the muscles that fight apnea.

BTW, this LA Outback store is doing an awesome job of cashing in on the study. I and many of the bloggers I found discovered the study through their gmail ads. And this video was uploaded by LA Outback. I bet they've sold lots of extra didges this way, which is awesome. They are profiting from spreading the word.