Parasomias and how to stop Night Terrors

https://youtu.be/YN1O5Yue6Xc There are so many different reasons for night wakings, but today we’re going to explore one particular thing that could be causing night wakings for your little one, and that is parasomnias. What on earth are they? In this week’s blog post I am going to explain exactly what they are, why they happen, how you can respond to them and how you can prevent them. Let’s delve into parasomnias. It’s a funny old word, isn’t it? Actually, it comes from para, meaning alongside of, and the Latin noun of somnus, which means sleep. It’s something that happens alongside sleep, basically. What is it? What are they? What are parasomnias? You will have heard of them in their individual little forms, things like sleep talking, sleep walking. You may have heard of night terrors or sleep terrors, those are all part of the parasomnia family. What they really are, what it really is, what it really means is a movement or behavior in sleep. That’s the easiest way to explain it. Things like sleep walking actually are pretty hereditary. It runs in families. If you were a sleep walker, maybe your child will be. Don’t be surprised if you see that, it does run along in families. That hopefully gives you an idea as to what parasomnias are and the group they belong to. Sleep walking, is walking in sleep. It’s getting up out of bed and physically walking around, and talking is talking or making noises in your sleep. But the one that I think needs a little more explanation is sleep terrors or night terrors, because a lot of parents think their child is having them. Maybe they are, maybe they’re not, so it’s good to understand what they actually even are. They are not bad dreams or nightmares or severe bad dreams or terror, that kind of thing. That’s a dream and it’s something that you wake up from and you can recall it. You can remember it if you try hard enough. The brain can recall it. Whereas, a sleep terror or night terror, whilst it can come across as being similar in the moment, maybe you can see them thrashing around or speaking and appearing upset. It looks like someone’s in a really bad dream. However it’s actually not the same thing. It’s not the same place. They’re actually in a state of somewhere between awake and asleep. They’re in a very deep sleep, but there’s an awake and an awareness element to it as well. I’m not going to go into the science right now. But what you’ll see in terms of the difference is a bad dream or a nightmare is, “Oh my gosh. It’s awful. It’s awful. I’m awake.” As opposed to a little one who looks like they are awake. They already look awake. With a night terror or a sleep terror, or actually the milder version that we tend to see in the younger ones is typically called a confusion arousal. It can still be a little bit upsetting or distressing in terms of their behavior, but it’s not quite as terrifying in terms of how they behave, but it is still very odd. They can be as mild as sitting up and looking around and looking for something and being confused and then going back to sleep, hopefully. The thing with those, confusional arousals, sleep terrors, night terrors, that kind of thing, is they will look or can look as though they are awake. Parents often describe it as they look like they’re possessed. Soetimes in this state if you approach them, they might look like they’re looking right through you and you’re feeling like, “They don’t recognize me,” or that they aren’t responding to you. When you try to comfort them or anything like that you don’t get a response and that’s how these episodes can be. How do you respond to them? That’s the thing. The key thing is not to try to jolt or shake or wake a person from a parasomnia. It would be really confusing for them. It could be upsetting, or you could actually just become a part of all of the confusion that they’re in. You just become a figure that’s in that weird world they’re in right now with their mind, if you think of it like t