Let’s talk about what really happens when you wake up and can’t move. Spoiler alert: It’s scary AF.
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It feels kind of like you woke up dead.
"Most patients say the same thing to describe sleep paralysis: that it feels like you woke up dead. You know that your mind is awake and your body is not — so you're trapped, essentially," Michael Breus, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, tells BuzzFeed Life.
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And it's way more complicated than a nightmare.
"It is the complete opposite, actually," Breus explains. When you enter deep REM sleep, your brain tells the body's voluntary muscles to relax and go into almost a state of paralysis, which is called atonia. Atonia actually helps protect the body from injury by preventing you from acting out the physical movements in your dreams. In other parasomnias, such as sleepwalking or REM sleep behavior disorder, atonia does not occur properly and the voluntary muscles move while the mind remains asleep, which is why people can sometimes do crazy things in their sleep and be totally unaware of it.
In sleep paralysis, the body remains paralyzed in REM atonia while the brain awakens and the eyes start to open, explains Breus. Sufferers become alert in a transient conscious state, but they are unable to move voluntary muscles or speak. Although involuntary muscle movement, like breathing, is not affected, there is often a sensation of chest pressure, which is why many people wake up from sleep paralysis gasping to take a deep breath. Episodes can last anywhere from twenty seconds to a few minutes.
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It happens when you're falling asleep or waking up.
Sleep paralysis can occur during one of two transitions in the sleep cycle. The body must go into REM sleep, and it must come out of it, but sleep paralysis occurs when the body has trouble making these transitions. If it happens when you're falling asleep, it's called hypnagogic sleep paralysis, whereas if it happens during waking it's called hypnopompic, Breus explains. Unfortunately, why the body can't transition smoothly is still unknown.
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