what is that body experience that occurs when your falling asleep and it feels like you fell down hard and why does it happen?
In: Biology
I bet a lot on here have had this happen in school, or laugh when you saw a classmate do it.
It’s called a hypnic jerk (or many other names) and it isn’t anything serious.
The majority of people report this experience right before falling asleep, and no one knows for sure why it happens. But there’s some competing theories.
One is that it is an involuntary reaction to you heart rate slowing down. The theory is that sometimes when you fall asleep your heart rate quickly decreases, and that this triggers a response that something is wrong and you do that jerk that quickly wakes you up/speeds up your heart rate again.
Another theory is that it is left over from our tree climbing ancestors, that our ancestors would jerk awake before falling asleep, which would help check that they were sleeping in a spot on the tree where they wouldn’t fall out and get hurt.
Another theory is that things like anxiety, stress, or even working out right before sleeping all cause it.
No one really knows for sure.
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