#97 Night Terrors

The Matt Walker Podcast

Dr. Matt Walker

Medicine, Science, Social Sciences, Health & Fitness

4.8 • 995 Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Matt takes the opportunity this week to explore the perplexing sleep phenomenon of night terrors (sleep terrors). Matt clarifies that these are distinct from nightmares, defining them as parasomnias arising from abrupt arousals out of deep Non-REM sleep, not REM sleep where dreaming occurs. He details the often dramatic symptoms – intense fear, screaming, sweating, rapid breathing, confusion, sometimes thrashing or sleepwalking – emphasizing the typical lack of memory of the event afterward. ...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast. Today we're going to dive into
0:09.5	perhaps a challenging and certainly I think misunderstood sleep phenomenon, night terrors.
0:17.0	You may have heard of night terrors or know someone who experiences them.
0:22.5	Unlike nightmares, which most of us have had,
0:26.8	night terrors are much less common and they present very differently.
0:32.7	They are essentially intense episodes that disrupt sleep, both for the individual and for the family of that individual.
0:43.3	And in today's show, I'm going to explain what night terrors are, what causes them, how they differ from nightmares and perhaps other sleep disturbances.
0:56.5	And I'll also cover some practical tips for managing night terrors if you or someone you know is affected by night terrors. So let's
1:03.8	start with the definition. Night terrors also called sleep terrors are a type of what we call a parasomnia. So parra means around somnia. So it is a disorder that
1:18.5	seems to occur around sleep, but not necessarily in sleep itself. Because it's an unusual
1:26.4	behavior that occurs during essentially the pseudo state of
1:32.2	wake and sleep. And they typically happen from an ejection out of deep non-REM sleep. And it is
1:41.7	that transition between deep sleep, up into light sleep, up into wakefulness,
1:47.5	and you almost get stuck somewhere in the middle on the sort of 13th floor, as it were. And so,
1:54.8	firstly, it's important to know that when someone is having a night terror, they're not having a
2:00.2	nightmare and they are not
2:02.0	dreaming. Because if someone comes out of a night terror and you ask them, what was going
2:07.2	through your mind before I woke you up? They typically don't have anything to say because they
2:12.5	weren't dreaming, because they weren't in REM sleep. They were coming out of deep sleep. And so nightmares,
2:19.4	those are the things that happen during rapid eye movement sleep, but night terrors happen
2:24.5	as were coming out of deep non-REM sleep. And these episodes of night terrors, they're really
2:30.9	quite frightening because they can involve screaming or sweating,
	...

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