Guille Faingold / Stocksy
When I was 11—a month after the formidable family dog had passed—an intruder broke into my home. It was right after school and no one else was home yet. He entered from the second floor, and it was by luck alone that our paths didn't directly cross before I was able to escape the house. I went out the front door and ran up the hill I lived on to an outdoor area where my family used to picnic together. Fortunately the neighbors called the police when they saw someone scaling the walls of my house. We moved out quickly after that.Nearly a decade later, the trauma from the incident began manifesting in symptoms of PTSD which showed up in my nightly sleep terrors. It's not surprising that a home invasion would leave a lasting impression on a growing brain, but unfortunately there's no cue card that makes it obvious that mental illness is what's happening. Parasomnias affect roughly 10 percent of people in the United States, and while treatment is as unique as the people experiencing them, we all just want to get some sleep.Apparently it's not normal for adults to panic in the middle of otherwise restful sleep, utterly certain that a person has gained entry into my room, but how would I know that when it happens every 24 hours for me?The Stanford Sleep Medicine Center describes night terrors as "episodes characterized by extreme terror and a temporary inability to attain full consciousness. The person may abruptly exhibit behaviors of fear, panic, confusion, or an apparent desire to escape." There's sometimes gasping, moaning, or screaming and there's no response to soothing from others. While the person isn't fully awake, once the episode passes, he or she often returns to normal sleep. What's even creepier: In most cases, there's no recollection of the episode in the morning.I experience night terrors predominantly in the comfort of my bed, in my own home. Imagine, if you will, the safest, most comfortable, soothing place in your world being a den of sudden jolts of fear and anxiety. For me, shapes and shadows play tricks on my mind in the darkness: It's why I can't sleep in a room where humanoid shapes—like a robe on a wall hook or a poster with a face—adorn the walls. Redecorating doesn't stop the night terrors from happening, but it does keep them from perpetuating once I'm in that space somewhere between conscious and asleep.
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Oftentimes awareness will seep in as I panic, so I find myself upright in bed, heart racing, skin clammy, my body shaking from the fear of an invasion that isn't actually happening. My husband has grown accustomed to me begging him for help in the middle of the night, only for me to come to and realize that I couldn't be safer.Although they are terrifying in the moment, and unlike nightmares (which I rarely experience), night terrors don't disrupt my sleep to the point of insomnia or not feeling rested in the morning. And while I haven't been diagnosed with OCD, I do have a pathological need to check the locks on my door at night—I have to touch them or it doesn't count—and I'm more uneasy in homes with multiple entries or notoriously unlocked doors. It's a paranoia directly related to my fear about safety.I've seen therapists and psychiatrists, taken pills and tried home remedies, meditated and filled the room with white noise, and for a while even tracked my sleep habits so I could wake myself up before the main event came. Yet in my many years coping with these nightly intrusions, the only thing that has ever put a longer term stop to the terror is traveling—specifically being away from home. Whether it's a hotel room, hostel dorms, or something else entirely, I sleep through the night about 95 percent better than when I'm in my comfort zone.This is true even in extreme situations like when I was camping in the jungles of Belize for two weeks, surrounded by actual dangers like jaguars and poachers with guns; I slept soundly in my totally exposed jungle hammock. What gives, brain?I have my own theories about why my night terrors disappear when I travel:1. My brain is a free spirited millennial and is conditioning me to travel more.
2. Brain's gotta take a vacation too.
3. A new environment puts me in survival mode, my reptile brain overriding the anxiety that leads to my night terrors.Unfortunately my one semester of undergraduate psychology doesn't quite qualify me to draw these conclusions, all of which are incorrect. "Generally it is more common to have night terror incidents away from home, 'waking' from deep sleep and finding the surroundings unfamiliar," says Kimberly Trotter, a registered sleep technologist and co-founder of the University of California San Francisco's Sleep Disorder Center. "It's rare for [sleep terrors] to bridge the gap to adulthood, and the reason kids have it is because they are having a lot of deep sleep," which is the state in which parasomnias like mine occur.When looking at my situation specifically, Trotter purports that, "it depends on what the night terrors manifested from. It depends on your form of PTSD. If yours involves your home then I wouldn't be surprised."Bingo.I explain to her that my trauma is rooted in a childhood home invasion, and that my night terrors feature the sensation of being broken in on, so it all made sense. Even though I don't live in the same house as the traumatic incident, Trotter assures me, "it's still home to you," and was very empathetic about my whole scenario, which I'm realizing is somewhat rare.I'm in the minority—most adults with sleep disorders aren't having night terrors triggered by being comfortable. Trotter suggests a coping mechanism I adopted a few years ago, and highly recommend: getting a dog. Not only does my dog warn me of people coming up my stairs (and possibly scare them away), but she can sense when I'm panicking, and physically comforts me until I calm down. And as far as retraining my subconscious, Trotter urges me to "lay in bed and think of calming, comforting thoughts as I'm falling asleep." She tells me to try meditation and visual imagery in the home so I can associate it with safety and security.And while I'm skeptical about mindfulness as an effective tool to combat a condition so deep-seated, I at least have a more salient understanding of what my brain is up to. If that doesn't help bring a little more peace to my at-home slumber routine, my white noise machine will promptly be replaced by jungle sounds, complete with the stealthy footsteps of jaguar padding around somewhere nearby.Read This Next: Is This a Map of Insomnia or Trump Anxiety?
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Oftentimes awareness will seep in as I panic, so I find myself upright in bed, heart racing, skin clammy, my body shaking from the fear of an invasion that isn't actually happening. My husband has grown accustomed to me begging him for help in the middle of the night, only for me to come to and realize that I couldn't be safer.Although they are terrifying in the moment, and unlike nightmares (which I rarely experience), night terrors don't disrupt my sleep to the point of insomnia or not feeling rested in the morning. And while I haven't been diagnosed with OCD, I do have a pathological need to check the locks on my door at night—I have to touch them or it doesn't count—and I'm more uneasy in homes with multiple entries or notoriously unlocked doors. It's a paranoia directly related to my fear about safety.I've seen therapists and psychiatrists, taken pills and tried home remedies, meditated and filled the room with white noise, and for a while even tracked my sleep habits so I could wake myself up before the main event came. Yet in my many years coping with these nightly intrusions, the only thing that has ever put a longer term stop to the terror is traveling—specifically being away from home. Whether it's a hotel room, hostel dorms, or something else entirely, I sleep through the night about 95 percent better than when I'm in my comfort zone.This is true even in extreme situations like when I was camping in the jungles of Belize for two weeks, surrounded by actual dangers like jaguars and poachers with guns; I slept soundly in my totally exposed jungle hammock. What gives, brain?
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2. Brain's gotta take a vacation too.
3. A new environment puts me in survival mode, my reptile brain overriding the anxiety that leads to my night terrors.Unfortunately my one semester of undergraduate psychology doesn't quite qualify me to draw these conclusions, all of which are incorrect. "Generally it is more common to have night terror incidents away from home, 'waking' from deep sleep and finding the surroundings unfamiliar," says Kimberly Trotter, a registered sleep technologist and co-founder of the University of California San Francisco's Sleep Disorder Center. "It's rare for [sleep terrors] to bridge the gap to adulthood, and the reason kids have it is because they are having a lot of deep sleep," which is the state in which parasomnias like mine occur.When looking at my situation specifically, Trotter purports that, "it depends on what the night terrors manifested from. It depends on your form of PTSD. If yours involves your home then I wouldn't be surprised."Bingo.I explain to her that my trauma is rooted in a childhood home invasion, and that my night terrors feature the sensation of being broken in on, so it all made sense. Even though I don't live in the same house as the traumatic incident, Trotter assures me, "it's still home to you," and was very empathetic about my whole scenario, which I'm realizing is somewhat rare.I'm in the minority—most adults with sleep disorders aren't having night terrors triggered by being comfortable. Trotter suggests a coping mechanism I adopted a few years ago, and highly recommend: getting a dog. Not only does my dog warn me of people coming up my stairs (and possibly scare them away), but she can sense when I'm panicking, and physically comforts me until I calm down. And as far as retraining my subconscious, Trotter urges me to "lay in bed and think of calming, comforting thoughts as I'm falling asleep." She tells me to try meditation and visual imagery in the home so I can associate it with safety and security.And while I'm skeptical about mindfulness as an effective tool to combat a condition so deep-seated, I at least have a more salient understanding of what my brain is up to. If that doesn't help bring a little more peace to my at-home slumber routine, my white noise machine will promptly be replaced by jungle sounds, complete with the stealthy footsteps of jaguar padding around somewhere nearby.Read This Next: Is This a Map of Insomnia or Trump Anxiety?