My Jaw-Slamming Sleep-Seizures Evolve & Multiply
Just in time for my 5-day in-hospital continuous EEG
If you have no idea what my jaw-slamming sleep-seizures are, this post might not make as much sense. 1
When I asked my dentist if tongue-piercing jaw spasms were a common phenomenon with TMJ splints, he said he had never heard of such a thing. He asked around. Neither had any of his colleagues. I couldn’t find a single reference to it online either.
But something was definitely happening beyond the bounds of my tooth and jaw issues, because at the same time…
MY NECK HEALING WENT INTO OVERDRIVE…
SLEUTHING THE PATTERN
There is a very specific pain that happens in the muscles surrounding and between my vertebrae when they’re working hard to restore the natural alignment of my warped, twisted spine. These are really deep, tiny muscles. Now that I know what it is, the best I can explain it is that it hurts so good.
When I started wearing that TMJ splint designed to relax the muscles on the left side of my jaw and re-engage the ones on the right, thus restoring the proper positioning of my mandible, a bunch of minuscule muscles way up on the top of my neck also started firing and tugging hard on those uppermost vertebrae.
Both of these phenomena—the jaw-slams and the vertebrae tugging—showed a sharp spike every time I went in to have the splint readjusted.
(Every one-to-two weeks, micro-layers are either ground down or added to the splint. This sends signals through the tooth nerves to the brain, telling it that your teeth are now touching properly so it should get over holding your jaw muscles in a misaligned clench. “Woo-saaaaah,” your tooth nerves whisper. “Just relaaaaax.” And lo. It does.)2
(Ideally.)
(PTSD brain and autism brain have other ideas, especially when there is an aggravating foreign object perpetually inside the mouth except while eating, and one has always stimmed to release stress by chewing on shit.)3
(Dumb brains doing dumb brain things. Blah.)
Throughout the time between splint adjustments, my seizures would decrease until I could finally take my daily brain-rebooting nap again without interruption. The rehab-pain in my neck muscles would also relax. Then I’d go in for another adjustment and WHAM! The next day or later that afternoon—jolting jaw-slams and pain in the tiniest, deepest muscles of my upper neck, throat, and under my chin.
EVOLUTION
As time went on, these phenomena stopped being confined to only my jaw slamming down.
Maybe it was the way my body started trying to resist the pain of constantly chomping down on my splint and puncturing my tongue? Maybe the explosive release of pent up energy that my malfunctioning system needed wasn’t being relieved whenever my body self-protectively pulled back on the reins of the jaw-slams? Maybe the symptom just…evolved?
I dunno.
Whatever it was, my neck started spasming and jerking my head, sometimes to the side, but mostly straight back. Then my spine started jerking, particularly in the low back. You know…in that spot that, since the night of my big car wreck, has felt like I have a knife jammed between the lumbar vertebrae?4 Later it progressed to my limbs, but always with that distinctive head rush and flash of light along with the twitch.
That’s actually what wakes me up most of the time. If it’s not the sound of my teeth clacking together or the pain of biting myself, it’s the ocean-wave sound inside my skull and the blinding flash of light. Not the movement of the twitch itself.
Since this went on in the same pattern for nine months, I didn’t see this as a coincidence. Neither was I surprised that, the closer I got to being done with the splint, the more those sleep-seizures waned.
INVISALIGN: SAME-SAME
Eventually, it was time to switch out the TMJ splint for Invisalign to correct the havoc wreaked by so much teeth-grinding on a misaligned jaw over more than two decades. As the computerized sensor mapped my teeth in preparation for creating the series of 25 tooth trays, I wondered if I would experience the same phenomenon every time I switched out Invisaligners.
In the weeks before my 5-day EEG, we busted butt and rearranged schedules in the hopes that I could get my first trays in time for the hospital stay. We wanted to catch it on the scan if I experienced the same kind of sleep-seizures as with the splint.
Ohhhhh, did I ever!
I received my first Invisalign trays on Thursday morning before the EEG, around 10:30. At 1:12 I tried to nap, and had my first jaw-slam. I had another at 1:19 and finally fell asleep.
With Invisalign, just like with an adjustment of traditional braces, the first few days are the most painful, as the teeth are yanked loose from the bone, pulled into a better position, and then the body has to re-grow new bone to hold them in place.
Throughout these first days, my jaw-slams and various other body jolts increased. This is what Sunday (Invisalign Day 4) looked like when I tried to take a nap:
11:26 a.m. - Small jaw slam.
11:30 - Big R arm twitch.
11:32 - Now L hand keeps twitching.
11:43 - Grinding so hard it woke me up. Then jaw slam as I was almost back asleep.
12:01 - Flash of light and head rush. Got up to pee.
12:15 - L hand twitch and head rush. Tapping out. Getting up. I’m more exhausted than when I laid down. Blahhhh.
Since Sunday was the day before my EEG, and they had wanted me sleep deprived for the last scan, I figured that going without my normal nap would actually be a good thing for them to see. After all, sleep deprivation is one of the most detrimental factors that increases every one of my neurological symptoms.
When I don’t get to reboot my hard drive at least once during the day, that’s when we’re more likely to experience The Bad Stuff. The more often The Bad Stuff happens, the more times during the day that we need to reboot the hard drive. It’s a lovely little catch-22.
So then. No nap the day before. As it turns out, I was woken up by a few more seizures that night. I also had insomnia from being nervous/excited for my hospital stay. So at 4:00 a.m., I got up and rode into the rising sun on only three hours of sleep.5
Exxxxcellent.
Let the brain-games begin!
UP NEXT: BRAIN GAMES. Now that we’re finally through the rabbit-hole tangent of all the symptoms that inspired my neurologist to send me for a 5-day continuous EEG, let’s go back to my hospital room and see what happened after they hooked me up to the ‘trodes, shall we?
© 2025 Hartebeast
If you missed the last post about my jaw-slamming sleep-seizures, you can watch them in the two videos I made, or get the whole experience here:
Autism and Mouth (Oral) Stimming
How autistic people experience sensory processing issues - why having these foreign objects in my mouth all day, every day, all night long, forever causing me micro-to-midgrade pain and unending mouth irritation makes me stim — because I’m overstimulated and stressed by it all day, every day, all night long. So the very thing that is supposed to help me stop grinding my teeth from TMJ keeps aggravating the oral stim. My orthodontist’s answer: “Well, just stop clenching your teeth. It’s as simple as that. Just stop.” SO FUCKING UNHELPFUL.
Now top the autism with my other lifelong issue: PTSD and teeth grinding. Because I’ve had PTSD since I was at least two years old.
If you missed the start of the 5-day in-hospital EEG adventure, you can catch up here:
