![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynThat feeling where you try to look up a single symptom about your sleep issue in the hopes of getting neutral information from a reliable, non-cancercancer source. Prompted by waking up the other night absolutely convinced that I'd heard the smoke alarm start to go off, then stop on its own:
In fairness, I know exploding head syndrome is harmless. I've read a lot of disturbing medical stuff in the past for fun and EHS is specifically cited in most of the things I've read as 'scary name, harmless problem'. But man, that is *not* a first screen I think most people would want to see.
Disclosure: I've had sleep weirdness most of my life. I scared my grandfather by sleepwalking as a kid. I talk in my sleep periodically. I've been informed that I have little fits of muscle jerking in my sleep- two twitches, then I go still, then a while later two twitches again. Apparently I had a period where I'd occasionally sit up, look around, make confused noises, and then slowly lie back down without a single word, but I never remember that in the morning.
And I've had plenty of occasions over the course of... at least the last five or six years? Maybe more... where I'd snap awake because my brain decided to play a single utterly convincing sound at me. It's one thing when it's someone saying my name. It's quite another when it's the sound of a rabid raccoon growling, or the smoke alarm sounding off. When you wake up with your heart pounding and a noise like that in your ears, you want to know what's going on.
The sitting-up thing, as far as I can tell, is what they call confusional arousal. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusional_arousals) It might or might not be related to EHS - they're both considered parasomnias but neither is all that well understood. Mostly they're considered harmless and best handled by de-stressing and trying to get more sleep. Maybe consuming more magnesium, too.
At this point I'm mostly just trying to keep tabs on brain weirdness and neurological weirdness in case any of it is related to tinnitus (which I have), perimenopause (which I may be in but I don't have an official diagnosis), or some of the neuroweirdness that hit my relatives when they got older. I'll probably mention it to my doctor, but I feel like I should have a bit more data from more than one night to offer her first.
In fairness, I know exploding head syndrome is harmless. I've read a lot of disturbing medical stuff in the past for fun and EHS is specifically cited in most of the things I've read as 'scary name, harmless problem'. But man, that is *not* a first screen I think most people would want to see.
Disclosure: I've had sleep weirdness most of my life. I scared my grandfather by sleepwalking as a kid. I talk in my sleep periodically. I've been informed that I have little fits of muscle jerking in my sleep- two twitches, then I go still, then a while later two twitches again. Apparently I had a period where I'd occasionally sit up, look around, make confused noises, and then slowly lie back down without a single word, but I never remember that in the morning.
And I've had plenty of occasions over the course of... at least the last five or six years? Maybe more... where I'd snap awake because my brain decided to play a single utterly convincing sound at me. It's one thing when it's someone saying my name. It's quite another when it's the sound of a rabid raccoon growling, or the smoke alarm sounding off. When you wake up with your heart pounding and a noise like that in your ears, you want to know what's going on.
The sitting-up thing, as far as I can tell, is what they call confusional arousal. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusional_arousals) It might or might not be related to EHS - they're both considered parasomnias but neither is all that well understood. Mostly they're considered harmless and best handled by de-stressing and trying to get more sleep. Maybe consuming more magnesium, too.
At this point I'm mostly just trying to keep tabs on brain weirdness and neurological weirdness in case any of it is related to tinnitus (which I have), perimenopause (which I may be in but I don't have an official diagnosis), or some of the neuroweirdness that hit my relatives when they got older. I'll probably mention it to my doctor, but I feel like I should have a bit more data from more than one night to offer her first.
