VERY deep sleep after migraine. Does it happen to anyone else?
Hello Everyone
Thanks for reading my post. I’ve been thinking about something recently and I hope that you can help by sharing your own experience. It’s to do with the weirdly deep sleep I have after a migraine attack.
Normally when I sleep, I talk, move a lot and wake up in a completely different position from how I fell asleep (I used to sleepwalk until my early 20s). When I wake up after a migraine, I am in exactly the same position, even my hands haven’t moved an inch. I’ve been told its impossible to wake me up without vigorous shaking (my ex freaked out the first time he found me at home, curled up and unresponsive). It’s like my body shuts down completely. Whether I sleep for an hour or eight hours, it’s the same catatonic-like state. Does this happen to anyone else? Does anyone know why this happens? Do you feel ok when you wake up?
As a side note, I should probably mention that, 90% of the time, my migraines involve pain on one side of my head with aura, blind spots and the inability to focus my eyes on anything. The remaining 10% is what I think of as a more straight-forward migraine – pain with nausea. For these, as soon as the nausea builds up enough to make me vomit (which usually happens within an hour or two from the onset), it feels like a valve is opened and the pain is released. For the migraine with aura, the only effective way I’ve found to deal with it is lying down in a cold, dark, quiet room which usually leads to my weird body-shut-down-sleep. I have paramax on prescription, but it only works if I take it immediately when I first start to feel an attack coming on.
I’d very much appreciate you sharing your experience on this, I’m really curious about how common this very deep sleep is and why it happens. I did ask my doctor, but she was quite dismissive and didn’t actually answer my question.
Many Thanks
Hi FionaD,
Thank you for reaching out with this very interesting topic. We're glad you're here and part of our community.
If I'm able to sleep a migraine attack off, I do sleep fairly deeply. I haven't noticed I sleep more deeply after a migraine attack. It may be our bodies way of recuperating after one.
Hopefully others will be along shortly to share their experiences with you.
Nancy
I've suffered from migraines since my teens and when I was about 25 I went home from work with a migraine. I slept through an important meeting the next day and turned up for work just before lunch. I was mortified and expected my boss to be furious but he told me that when I hadn't arrived or called that he hadn't expected me until later. I worked for the health service and he was a former nurse who had studied migraines and told me that French studies had shown that some sufferers are his by a very deep sleep afterwards. My son and daughter also get migraines and my son (aged 11) slept for 19.5 hours after his last attack.
Hi alisonbruce,
Thank you for sharing that with us. Interestingly enough I had a nasty migraine attack yesterday and did sleep deeply last night!
You're not the only one FionaD. After a migraine attack, my sleep is very deep and I wake up in the same position I started. It's like I'm some kind of coma. Normally in my sleep, I move and wake up in a different position then when I started.
