In this video I describe the symptoms and treatment for several sleep disorders including insomnia, sleep apnea, sleepwalking, night terrors, sleep paralysis, REM sleep behavior disorder, and narcolepsy.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re gonna look at some examples of sleep disorders and we’ll start with a fairly common sleep disorder. This is one that affects about ten percent of adults at some point in their life, which is insomnia. Now you may already know that insomnia refers to an inability to fall asleep but it’s important to remember that insomnia refers to a difficulty entering the sleep state that’s persistent and it occurs even when the person is tired and they should be able to fall asleep.

So if you decide to try to go to bed earlier than usual and you have trouble falling asleep or if you drink too much caffeine late in the day then you can’t fall asleep that night, that wouldn’t be a symptom of insomnia. Now there’s also a type of insomnia called “terminal insomnia” so this refers to a situation where a person is able to fall asleep at night but then they wake up and they’re unable to fall back asleep. So they may wake up after just a few hours, they might wake up at four in the morning, and they’re still tired and they want to continue sleeping but they’re unable to. This terminal insomnia is associated with some other psychological disorders such as depression and this relates to another thing that will come back to when we talk about psychological disorders. This is the idea that sleep disturbance and sleep problems are associated with a number of other psychological disorders. So in this way our quality of sleep can serve as a sort of indicator of our overall health.

Alright the next disorder that we’ll look at is called sleep apnea and so in sleep apnea what happens is a person is sleeping and the muscles in their throat and their tongue relax and this causes them to block the flow of air the person can’t breathe. Then the person will wake up in order to move these muscles and then breathe and then they’ll fall back asleep and this can happen repeatedly throughout the night. In some severe cases this airway obstruction occurs hundreds of times, so the person is waking up for a very brief moment, just long enough to breathe. They might wake up for a second or two and then they fall back asleep and often people don’t know that this is happening. They don’t remember waking up for a second or two and so what happens is they feel tired all the time, they don’t know why because they seem to be sleeping enough at night, you know? “I’m sleeping eight hours a night, yeah I’m still constantly tired” and so the explanation is that they’re not getting good quality sleep. They’re waking up over and over again throughout the night and it’s disrupting their sleep and that’s why they’re still tired even though they were in bed for eight hours.

Now one way that sleep apnea can be treated is a device called a CPAP machine in this stands for continuous positive airway pressure and so what this does is there’s a mask that goes on the person’s face is connected to a machine that provides a little bit of air pressure on the throat. Just enough to keep the throat open while the person is sleeping so that even when these muscles relax the airway remains open. The person can breathe and therefore they can stay asleep. Now I mentioned in a previous video that sleep apnea is associated with obesity and so people who are obese are more likely to suffer from sleep apnea and one thing that can help is losing weight. This can actually help to reduce this problem.

Ok, so that’s sleep apnea and now we have another sleep disorder and this is one that you are probably familiar with and this is sleepwalking. So sleepwalking refers to a condition where the person is sleeping but they begin engaging in behaviors like walking around. They may even do things like eat and they’re still technically asleep. Now you may have heard some myth that it’s, you know, dangerous to wake someone up with sleepwalking. And that as I said, is a myth. It’s perfectly safe to wake someone up although they’re probably going to be very confused and they’re going to be groggy and this is because sleepwalking occurs during slow-wave sleep. Alright so this is that stage 3 sleep and so this means the person is going to experience that sleep inertia, they may be really out of it if you wake them up. So you can do this, it’s perfectly safe, where you can sort of try to guide them back to bed but you know you won’t harm them in any way if you wake them up in the process. Another thing with sleepwalking is that it’s most common in children and it tends to go away on its own. So often children have this and then once they reach puberty it tends to stop happening.

So that’s sleepwalking but another thing that happens with children if they may experience night terrors. So what happens in a night terror is the child wakes up in the middle of the night, they feel an overwhelming sense of fear, and often they scream and yell. This is very alarming for their parents but it doesn’t really indicate any other problems. It’s not really a big deal and often the child the next morning won’t even remember that this incident has occurred.

Now a similar thing that can happen is called sleep paralysis and this can happen in adults as well and this actually happens to a lot of people just not very frequently. It’s only a few people who have this happen persistently and over and over again. But you may have even experienced this yourself. So sleep paralysis is where you wake up in the middle of the night and you’re unable to move your body. So what’s happening is you’re waking up from REM and even though you are mentally awake your body is sort of still in this REM paralysis state and this is often accompanied by a sense of fear. They wake up, they feel afraid, and they can’t move. That can make their fear a little worse and in some people they experience some hallucinations as well. They may report hearing hissing sounds or sort of random strange noises and they may even report seeing sort of shadowy figures around their bed. They’re awake enough to know that they’re in their room but they’re sorts still seeing some dreamlike imagery and this is a probable explanation for all sorts of supernatural experiences that people have had when they claim to have seen spirits or ghosts in the middle of the night when they were sleeping. Or that they were abducted by aliens and they were paralyzed and laying in their bed and the aliens were surrounding them probably they were experiencing an episode of this sleep paralysis.

Now another thing that can happen is sort of the opposite, rather than waking up and remaining paralyzed we have people who don’t become paralyzed while they’re dreaming. And this is REM sleep behavior disorder. So as I said what happens is the person is asleep they enter the REM state and normally this paralysis should occur but in these people it doesn’t happen and this means that they can engage in dream enactment. They can start moving their body in response to the dreams that they’re having and this is really dangerous because they can easily harm themselves. If they’re dreaming about running or they’re fighting and they start punching or kicking the furniture. They can run into the wall or they get hurt if they have anybody who’s sharing a bed with them, you know, it’s dangerous for that person as well. Comedian Mike Birbiglia describes his own experience with this disorder where he actually threw himself through a window from a second-story room in a hotel because of this REM sleep behavior disorder here. He was acting out his dream and obviously this can be really dangerous and so the way that this is treated is often people are given muscle relaxants this will help to reduce their motor activity while they’re sleeping or in some cases they are given a special bag to sleep in. Sort of a sleeping bag that is designed to constrict their movements and keep them from harming themselves or others.

Ok, so that is REM sleep behavior disorder and the last disorder that will look at is narcolepsy. This is one you may have heard of before so narcolepsy refers to a sudden attack of sleep. It’s a sudden irrepressible need to sleep, right? It comes on very suddenly and the person just falls asleep and can’t control it and often they enter the REM state very quickly. Ok, so a person who has narcolepsy has these sudden attacks of sleep where they suddenly fall asleep and they can’t help it and this is not related to the fact that, it’s not the case that they’re not sleeping enough at night. They’re getting a normal amount of sleep at night and yet they still have these sudden strong urges to sleep.

Now many people with narcolepsy also experience a symptom called cataplexy and this is where they experience the body paralysis that would normally accompany REM sleep. And so when this cataplexy occurs they lose their muscle tone. They may fall down and they’re unable to move and sometimes the cataplexy occurs even though the person actually is awake. So they’re laying there and people think that they’re sleeping and people try to wake them up and so patients have described people screaming into their ear to try to wake them up or pinching them really hard to try to awaken them and of course the person can feel this because they are awake they’re just not able to move in response to this. So this can be a really terrible experience for these people. Now narcolepsy can be treated with stimulants and one of these stimulants may have even heard of called Modafinil and the reason you may have heard of it is because it’s also used off-label as a study aid or sort of cognitive enhancer for people trying to increase their productivity and that’s something that we’ll look at in more detail in the unit on intelligence.

Ok, so those are some examples of sleep disorders, I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!