Why do I often suffer from sleep paralysis?

If you often suffer from sleep paralysis, then you should pay attention to your emotional state and whether it is a problem of excessive stress. Bad sleeping posture may also cause this phenomenon. You must pay attention to relieving stress and avoid anxiety and tension.

1. Sleep paralysis refers to the condition in which one suddenly becomes conscious but cannot move while sleeping. In fact, it is a sleep disorder. The phenomenon of "ghost pressing on the body" is a symptom of sleep paralysis in sleep neurology. The patient is in a state of half awake and half asleep during sleep, with brain waves at the amplitude of wakefulness. Some people even have visual hallucinations, but the muscle tension of the whole body is reduced to the lowest level. When people are sleeping, they suddenly feel as if there is a thousand-pound weight pressing on the body, making them drowsy and breathless, as if they are neither awake nor asleep. They want to shout but cannot, and they want to move but cannot. People feel puzzled and terrified, as if there is a transparent object pressing on their body, and combined with the dream, it is given a "figurative" name - being pressed by a ghost. In fact, this is called "nightmare" in medicine.

2. Like dreaming, nightmare is also a physiological phenomenon. When a person suddenly wakes up from a dream, some of the nerve centers in the brain have woken up, but the nerve centers that control the muscles have not yet fully woken up. Therefore, although he feels uncomfortable, he cannot move. At this time, if someone wakes him up or pushes him, the nightmare will disappear immediately. ?

3. Patients with "cataplexy-type narcolepsy" most often suffer from the condition of "being paralyzed by a ghost". This type of patients can fall asleep at any time and are in a half-awake and half-asleep state at any time. They often have "hypnotic hallucinations" and dream of strange people, things and objects. When the patient is awake, whenever he is excited, laughing, or angry, he will suddenly feel weak all over and may fall down.

4. Our sleep cycle goes through the following sequence: falling asleep, light sleep, deep sleep, and finally the "rapid eye movement" period (dream period). Sleep paralysis is mainly related to the early onset of rapid eye movement (REM), which leads to inconsistency in coordination during the REM stages. In fact, during the REM stage, the body is essentially in a resting state, and the connection signals with the brain are temporarily interrupted. This is a defensive measure so that the human body will not realize dreams in real life. For example, if you dream of beating someone, you will not actually take action and punch or kick the person next to you.

5. When the sleep nerves are paralyzed, the brain wakes up from sleep and has no time to reconnect with the body, causing the person to be in a half-asleep and half-awake state, with dreams and reality intertwined, causing incoordination between the body and the brain. At this time, the muscle tension of the whole body is the lowest, so you will want to get up, but can't; you want to use strength, but can't. This is the most common situation of "ghost pressing on the body".