Ever wake up with the sounds of explosions loudly going off in your head? You may be part of the growing population of people who are suffering from what is called exploding head syndrome. A startling new study found in the Journal of Sleep Medicine suggests that a whopping 1 in 5 young adults say that they experience this horrific disorder.
Discussions surrounding this scary sleep disorder can be found dating back to the late 1800s, when Philadelphia physician Silas Weir Mitchell published his paper “On Some of the Disorders of Sleep,” in the Virginia Medical Monthly. Mitchell described the case of a patient he referred to as “Mr. V” who experienced a “sense of a pistol shot or a blow on the head.”
Around 1920, Dr. Robert Armstrong-Jones, a psychiatrist documented that several of his patients experience similar symptoms that were described as the “terrifying nighttime snapping of the brain.”
According to Lisa Medalie, a doctor of psychology and a behavioral sleep medicine specialist at the University of Chicago, “the abnormal sensation lasts only a few seconds, but the fright from the event often causes problems returning to sleep and symptoms of insomnia.” Research suggests that this disorder is brought on by lack of sleep and stress, that both contribute to your brain’s capability to completely shutdown at bedtime.
Simply put, a normal person’s brain shuts down in stages, piece by piece. The brain of someone with this disorder experiences somewhat of a neuron freak accident (for lack of better words), and everything just shuts off all at once. This is what creates the explosive noises these individuals experience.
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Brian Sharpless, director of Washington State University’s psychology clinic, became interested in investigating exploding head syndrome after reading available research. “I didn’t believe the clinical lore that it would only occur in people in their 50s,” Sharpless said in a press release. “That didn’t make a lot of biological sense to me.”
For the most recent Washington State University study, researches studied 211 college undergrads. Not only did nearly one in five – 18 percent – experience exploding head syndrome, they also found more than one-third with EHS also experienced isolated sleep paralysis, an equally scary experience of being unable to move or speak after waking up.
There currently isn’t a medication on the market that effectively treats this disorder, but most doctors and researchers have concluded the disorder to be pretty harmless from a physical standpoint. The major harm that tends to come from this scary issue is how it affects one mentally and emotionally.
Many doctors find that their patients that suffer from EHS lack education around the subject matter and assume there is more wrong with them than there actually is. Sharpless shares many don’t discuss the condition with their family and friends. It also leads to feelings of stress, anxiety and many sleepless nights.
To help cope with EHS, lifestyle changes such as avoiding caffeine and other stimulants around bed time, regular exercise, and mediation are the typical directives given to patients.
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