Common symptoms of narcolepsy, such as excessive sleepiness during the day and sleep problems at night, can affect your quality of life. Here’s how you can get them under control.
Living with narcolepsy can interfere with your daily life, especially if your symptoms are severe. Common symptoms include excessive daytime sleepiness, cataplexy (sudden loss of motor strength and tone), and hallucinations or paralysis while falling asleep or waking up. These can impact various facets of your life, including how well you function at school or work, how much you can participate in activities you enjoy, and even your relationships.
Like other chronic health conditions, narcolepsy and its symptoms need to be treated and managed. “There’s no cure for narcolepsy, but my job is to help patients function as best as possible,” says Raj Dasgupta, MD, an assistant professor of clinical medicine at Keck Medicine of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. According to Stanford University’s Center for Narcolepsy, also in California, most people can achieve close to full function — about 80 percent — with the right treatment.
1. Extreme Daytime Sleepiness
Narcolepsy is a neurological disorder that causes nighttime sleep to be choppy and fragmented, explains Andrew Varga, MD, an assistant professor of medicine, pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine at the Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
2. Disrupted Sleep at Night
If you have narcolepsy, you fall asleep easily and swiftly, says Thorpy. But that doesn’t mean you sleep well. Not only is your sleep fragmented, but also the stages of sleep are not normal. In a typical sleep cycle, people fall asleep, go into non–rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, and then transition into rapid eye movement (REM) sleep after about 90 minutes, according to the Cleveland Clinic. But if you have narcolepsy, you dive right into REM sleep, explains Thorpy.
3. Loss of Muscle Tone
“Cataplexy is a loss of muscle tone when exposed to intense emotions like laughter, sadness, or crying,” explains Dr. Dasgupta. Not all people with narcolepsy have cataplexy, and it can look different from person to person. It can also develop years into living with narcolepsy. According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, cataplexy attacks can range from minor drooping of the eyelids to “total body collapse,” but you do remain conscious during episodes.
4. Sleep Paralysis
When you enter REM sleep, nature protects you from acting out your dreams by putting your body in sleep paralysis, which is a temporary loss of muscle tone. In normal sleep, this occurs during the night. If you have narcolepsy, though, you transition into REM sleep quickly, and some people experience temporary sleep paralysis at the onset of sleep or when waking up.
What you can do:
To reduce your risk of sleep paralysis, Dr. Kushida recommends maintaining good sleep habits. That includes:
Sticking to a set sleep and wake time
Shutting down devices with screens (tablet, computer, phone, TV) at least 30 minutes before bedtime
Keeping your bedroom quiet, cool, and dark
Avoiding alcohol and caffeine late in the evening (which can interfere with sleep)
Avoiding large, heavy meals, especially close to bedtime
Managing stress
Comments