Hi.  I used to have this somewhat.   It can be caused by subconscious hyperventilation.

http://www.sleepdisordersguide.com/hyperventilation.html
“Both sleep apnea and snoring occur due to incorrect breathing, specifically over breathing or hyperventilation”

Basically chronic stress leads to chronic subconscious hyperventilation.  It makes perfect sense.  

If your nervous system is in fight or flight, it thinks you are about to run or fight, and you cells will produce more CO2 and therefore will need more O2.  So your breathing rate and depth increases.

Problem is....with modern day stress, our muscles are not generating CO2. We are just sitting there overbreathing for our level of activity.

If you are sleeping and overbreathing, what happens is your CO2 gets too low, so you stop breathing for a while.  Then when your CO2 gets too high, you take a big sudden gasp

I keep plugging it :) But what solved this for me is the Buteyko Breathing Technique.  It corrects subconscious breathing by re-training your internal set-point for CO2.

It really works.
http://www.buteykoairways.com/apnea.htm

Buteyko corrected much more than sleep problems for me.  Hyperventilation is responsible for many of our symptoms since hyperventilation actually starves your cells of oxygen.

Here is a study showing how hyperventilation reduces cerebral blood flow.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC522264/figure/F3/

It does this because CO2 dilates blood vessels.  And since hyperventilation flushes out your CO2,  your blood vessels constrict.

This is why we have cold hands and feet.  I have not had cold hands and feet since I started Buteyko:)

Oh..here is a test for hyperventilation syndrome.   

http://www.massageandbodywork.com/Articles/JuneJuly2007/images/Nijmegen%20Q.jpg

It had been found to correctly identify chronic hyperventilation 95% of the time

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4009520

Found these articles showing how apnea can follow a session of hyperventilation.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1155616/ 

http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/the-american-physiological-society/posthyperventil...

Correct the hyperventilation (with Buteyko)...and correct the apne  ;)