What You Should Know About Sleep Paralysis

Sleep paralysis is the inability of one to move after waking up from sleep. The person may feel weak and unable to stand up even though he is awake on his bed, matress or mat. Many people have the notion that it is a spiritual problem.

Some suspect that there are spirits that come and sit down on one’s body to stop him from moving, hence he experiences sleep paralysis. There are people that also believe that many spirits interfere into humans affairs by either entering their bodies to cause madness, cut their hairs, body or draw marks on someone’s face or skin.

Those who allegedly cause madness are termed as ‘evil spirits’ while those who purportedly cut or draw marks on people’s skins in the night are tagged as ‘Night barbers’. This is just as ‘spirit’ causing weakness and one to be unable to move after waking up from sleep is called ‘Dannau’ in the hausa community.

However, doctors have refuted many of those assertions describing them as mere superstitious beliefs. Psychiatrists urge many people having madness to go to hospitals stressing that they could be having psychiatric issues rather than spiritual problems as some people think.

According to them, most of the symptoms and signs exhibited by people who are thought to get madness by spirits can be caused by psychiatric problems and are curable.

Similarly, there is a widely held notion that sleep paralysis is caused by a spirit who comes and sit on top of person’s body to prevent him from moving after waking up from sleep.

But a medical practitioner Dr Maryam Almustapha has debunked the notion suggesting that sleep paralysis is a spiritual problem.

Speaking exclusively in a telephone conversation with our correspondent, Maryam clarified that the problem has to do with person’s brain and muscles adding that sleep paralysis makes one to be feeble and unable to stand up after waking up from sleep.

According to her, the problem which affects many can be scary as it can make one unable to move and breath while awake in bed and aware of his surrounding.

She said the problem affects a lot of people and makes them unable to move, breath even as it causes hallucinations to some people. That is feeling as if you are hearing some sounds or speeches and seeing things near you when in actual sense, there is nothing.

“It can happen to you before sleeping or after waking up. It can last from seconds to few minutes. Sleep paralysis is actually not uncommon. In every 10 people, at least four can experience it from time to time”. She said.

Buttressing her points further, Dr Maryam explained that sleep is in two stages namely, ‘REM sleep and non ‘REM sleep’ which imply heavy and light sleeps respectively.

The medical practitioner added that people have dreams in the first stage and their brains send signals to their muscles to turn off so that they will not be moving while dreaming to prevent them from hitting the wall or falling down from the bed.

Maryam pointed out that sleep paralysis occurs when the brain fails to send signal in time to the muscles to turn on again after a person wakes up from sleep.

She said real cause of sleep paralysis cannot be ascertained but that some life habits like lying on the back, irregular sleep, consumption of caffeine and alcohol and other factors including genetics, stress, depression and anxiety among others can be responsible for the disorder.

While revealing that sleep paralysis has no known cure, the medical expert noted that some of the remedies for the problem are avoiding lying on the back, abstaining from use of alcohol, caffeine, maintaining regular sleep habit by going to bed at a usual time, getting enough sleep of six to eight hours as well as reducing light or noise in the sleeping place.

“The actual theoretical physical risk is paralysis of the respiratory muscles that allow us to breathe. Theoretically if it lasts long enough it can affect breathing which can result in a number of problems”. She stated.

Asked whether sleep paralysis can result to death, Maryam said “the condition usually doesn’t last long enough to physically harm us and hence no cases of such fatalities have been reported”.