Final Informative Paper
English
21003, Section M
Professor
Matyakubova
13
September 2017
Informative report
Sleep Paralysis: The unknown
When sleep is mentioned people tend
to think of it as a time you let your body and mind to relax. Sleep paralysis
is a state that can disturb a person mentally, just think about waking up one morning
and not being able to move any of your muscles and not being able to speak. In
many cases the cause of sleep paralysis is common with people who are
psychiatric patients. Sleep paralysis doesn’t just happen to people with
medical issues but it can happen to a normal average person. So, every time you
go to sleep, there is a chance you may wake up paralyzed. Sleep paralysis is
something that happens during your REM cycle, but the causes has been uncertain
to scientists for many years.
What is REM and
Sleep paralysis?
Sleep
paralysis happens when a person is unable to move or speak but are mentally
awake. One can experience sleep paralysis when
awake or falling asleep. When one gets sleep paralysis they are unable to move
but they are aware of their current situation. It can be scary for many people, waking up not being able to move their
body and not knowing the reason. People would freak out because they aren’t
able to move causing a panic that increases their heart rate.
Isolated
sleep paralysis is listed for people who have sleep paralysis but without the
medical conditions listed above. ISP lasts to 1
or 2 minutes during this time the person is unable to move or speak, but
breathing is not affected. The difference is that there are cases where person
may have dream-like visuals often said to be hallucination which can be scary. In
a experiment 75.64% of participants had experienced at least one fearful
ISP episode, 10.90% went through clinically distress due to ISP episodes. (Sharpless
et al., 3). These hallucinations tend to be something frightening to the
individual and can give the individual a panic attack. fearful ISP had given 12.8%
of a sample of patients panic attacks (Sharpless,
et al. 2).
According to the article “Sleep deprivation suppresses
the increase of rapid eye movement density across sleep cycles”, REM (rapid eye movement) is something that happens
when a person is dreaming. It is said during REM sleep your eyes move quickly
in a random motion. The REM cycle has 4 stages, each stage increases your depth
of sleep. (Cristina, et al 2). As you go into deep sleep your brain tells your
body muscles to go into a state of atonia. Atonia is important during your
sleep because it doesn’t allow any movement of muscles. Since the state of
atonia happens during REM sleep. Waking up in the middle of a REM cycle can be
a cause of sleep paralysis because the body’s ability to move has not been
enabled yet.
Courtesy of
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2869.2010.00886.x/pdf
There is also non-Rem cycle where rapid eye
movement doesn’t occur. At first, we go through the non-REM cycle and
eventually we will end up in the REM cycle, where dreams occasionally happen. Non-REM
phase can last 15-30 minutes. Stage one occurs the moment you close your eyes
but you can still be awakened easily. Stage 2 is when your heart rate slows
down and the temperature of your body drops. Stage 3 is when you hit the deep
sleep stage and if awakened during this stage disoriented feelings will occur
for a short time. REM cycle usually
occur after 60-90 minutes after you have fallen asleep (Cristina, et al 2).
Possible Factors of
Sleep Paralysis
One possible factor of sleep paralysis can be
sleep deprivation, According to the article “Isolated Sleep
Paralysis: Fear, Prevention, and Disruption.” By Brian, et al. 35 studies were done that consist of 36,000
participants, within these participants 7.6% of them has experienced one
episode of sleep paralysis. The studies also found out that 28.3% of them were
students and 31.9% were psychiatric patients. Other factors can be in
certain medical conditions (e.g., narcolepsy, seizure disorders) (Brian, et al.
1). This shows that sleep paralysis occurs at a high rate to students and to
patients with psychiatric history. It can be said that sleep deprivation can be
one of the causes to sleep paralysis because many students in universities are
likely to suffer from sleep deprivation, due to excess work/studying needed to do
well academically. Therefore, some ways to prevent sleep paralysis can be as
easy as getting more sleep.
Narcoleptic patients are more likely
to experience sleep paralysis. The reason being Narcolepsy is a neurological disorder that
affects the control of how drowsy one can be and how alert they can be. People
with narcolepsy experience
excessive daytime sleepiness and can’t control falling asleep during the
daytime. They may experience sudden sleep attacks that can occur during any
type of activity at any time of the day (Sieminski,
et al. 1).
There is no
actual effective treatment that will fix sleep paralysis, but there are some
ways that can help prevent it. One method that was tested on many people and
was partially successful was disrupting their sleep. Disrupting a person’s
sleep is not an easy task, if disrupted at the wrong time sleep paralysis take
effect. Therefore, the most effective way of preventing sleep paralysis by
disruption is when you wake them up once a REM cycle ends. While only 69.29% of
the participants were interrupted sleep episodes, 54.12% of those believed it
was successful (Sharpless,
et al. 4).
The major problem about this medical condition is
that it is almost impossible to find accurate information, since these
so-called experiments were just surveys. These factors are possible causes of
sleep paralysis from surveys they have given. There can be many possible factors
to sleep paralysis that is still unknown today. The lack of attention caused
each culture finding their own beliefs to explain why sleep paralysis happens.
found
that as many as 71 % of Egyptians from the general population explain SP
supernaturally; and 48 % specifically believe their SP to be caused by the
Jinn, spirit-like creature rooted in Islamic tradition. In addition, 22 % of
the general Egyptian population attributes SP to the Shaitan (demons). (Jalal, Baland, et al. 3)
This proves that there is
a lack of research/study in sleep paralysis and the amount of knowledge we have
about sleep paralysis is very minimal to the point where people of many
cultures start to believe unrealistic beings are causing harm to us. The reason
that there aren’t many research in this unusual sleeping disorder, is because
sleep paralysis only last for a few minutes. Not only does it last for a short
period of time but it doesn’t cause any harm or death.
Some reasons why we are still unable to find the accurate
information on sleep paralysis today is it not being common. Sleep paralysis is
a state that happens when you’re about to fall asleep or when you wake up and
usually last up till 2 minutes. It is said an average person will experience at
least 1 sleep paralysis episode in their life. It would be hard to gather data
on an incident that doesn’t happen frequently on one’s daily life. Multiple
records of sleep paralysis must be recorded to find accurate information but if
an average person experience once in their life time, it would make it
troublesome to find information (Sharpless, et al.).
Even with all the negatives effects about sleep
paralysis, there are still some positives effects about having sleep paralysis.
Sleep paralysis happens because of atonia. Atonia helps protect a person and
others from any physical injuries they can receive. By taking away physical
movement, one will not be able to sleep walk. Without atonia sleep walking
would be common and many people will be doing unusual things daily in their
sleep without any awareness. “There is no telling what could happen, during
REM sleep, where most of vivid dreaming occurs, a paralysis of skeletal muscles
(atonia) prevents people from acting out their dreams” (Jalal and Hinton 2013,
in press).
Since the cause of sleep paralysis and how the
REM cycle is related has been uncertain for many years, the REM cycle is common
for everyone and during this cycle, muscles would go through a state atonia.
When in atonia your muscles will be in a relaxed state restricting movement
during sleep. The possible causes of sleep paralysis are sleep deprivation and
certain medical conditions. Sleep paralysis can affect people mentally because
one can see hallucination during the state of sleep paralysis. With sleep
paralysis being a risk to anyone and not just to people who are
mentally/physically ill, more people need to be educated because if it happens
they need to know how to react and not to panic.
Abstract
Although sleep paralysis does not cause harm to the
person experiencing it, sleep paralysis has been going on for many years. Yet
we still have trouble finding the causes or factors of sleep paralysis. The
reason why is because sleep paralysis is an uncommon condition that causes
someone to become paralyzed when attempting to sleep or waking up, sleep
paralysis happens randomly. This making it harder for scientist to figure out
the factors that are causing sleep paralysis. Another problem is that sleep
paralysis usually last up to a few seconds or till 2 minutes. However, we have
some information on possible things that can increase the chance of sleep
paralysis happening. Some studies show that sleep deprivation and having
sleeping disorders can both be a cause of sleep paralysis.
Work Cited
Sharpless, Brian Andrew and Jessica
Lynn Grom. "Isolated Sleep Paralysis: Fear, Prevention, and Disruption." Behavioral Sleep
Medicine, vol. 14, no. 2, Mar/Apr2016, pp.
134-139. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/15402002.2014.963583.
Marzano, Cristina, et al. "Sleep
Deprivation Suppresses the Increase of Rapid Eye Movement Density across Sleep Cycles." Journal
of Sleep Research, vol. 20, no. 3, Sept. 2011, pp. 386-394. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/j.1365-2869.2010.00886.x.
Sieminski, Mariusz and Markku
Partinen. "'Non-Dipping' Is Equally Frequent in Narcoleptic Patients
and in Patients with Insomnia." Sleep & Biological Rhythms, vol. 14,
no. 1, Jan. 2016, pp. 31-36. EBSCOhost,
doi:10.1007/s41105-015-0004-z.
Jalal, Baland, et al. "Cultural
Explanations of Sleep Paralysis in Italy: The Pandafeche Attack and
Associated Supernatural Beliefs." Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry, vol.
39, no. 4, Dec. 2015, pp. 651-664. EBSCOhost,
doi:10.1007/s11013-015-9442-y.
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