Kristina Das
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Written By: Kristina Das | Published : September 13, 2018 11:18 PM IST
Try negating stress, eating healthy, exercising or indulging in mild therapeutic activities. © Shutterstock
Sleep paralysis can be tormenting. If you have never experienced sleep paralysis it is hard to explain how scary this is. Like you are asleep and dreaming. The next, you're awake, you cannot move a muscle to do anything about it and the dream is still going on.
People who experience sleep paralysis they simply cannot move a muscle. They can't react, speak at all, they can only move their eyes. They are both fully awake and asleep. Even the body get confused about what state it should be in. This can happen both upon waking and falling asleep. The body doesn't get a chance to shut down entirely when it happens on the way to sleep. The body wakes up before the mind has a chance to when people experience it upon waking.
However, many people experience sleep paralysis alongside horrifying dreams, which seem like visions because the body is awake.
Periods of sleep paralysis are usually short, lasting anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. Generally, they can last for a few hours.
During this condition, the muscles are always paralyzed. This keeps us from acting out our dreams and injuring ourselves, hurting other people.
Even the scientists aren't exactly sure why this happens. However, it seems to correspond to overactivity in the attentive part of the brain.
Somehow, the brain's signals somehow get crossed and it perceives a dream threat as a threat in real life. It does not complete this process but it wakes the body. Thus, the person cannot do anything about it, but he or she feels threatened.
Though this is not an inherently dangerous condition. However, it can make difficult for a person to sleep, thus the person can suffer from sleep deprivation. And this can cause sleep paralysis in turn and cause more sleep deprivation. Basically, this sleep deprivation starts with anxiety. People become so worried about experiencing an episode of sleep paralysis that they can't fall asleep at all.
