Why does the human body jerk/shock itself awake sometimes while trying to sleep?
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IMO it’s the moment a muscle or muscles relax as the brain fully succumbs to sleep and releases the subconscious hold on that muscle. The slump (however minute) feels like slipping and our brain rallies to re-orient ourself. IE nodding off.
This can be prevented by mentally checking in with your muscle groups while you lie in bed and consciously relaxing them. “Shoulders, arms, core, legs, feet” etc. I learned this walk through from a meditation audio and found it incredibly helpful and enlightening. It guided you to tense a particular muscle then relax it, and went through the whole body.
“Brain thinks we’re paralyzed” is an insane concept parroted too easily.
There are a few leading theories, but ultimately we are anxiety ridden apes and our brains subconciously torment us for reasons, and that is supposed to help us survive. Most of our anxiety stems from behavioral patterns(both concious and unconcious) that allowed us to survive in the early days of humanity. But now we have survival responses firing off for no reason and its deeply upsetting to most people.
The human body isn’t just one object. Sometimes two different systems don’t talk to each other correctly. One tries to move the system to standby mode and the endocrine system detects that and says “biorhythms are too slow right now, HAVE SOME ADRENALINE! MORE HAVE SOME MORE!”
Nobody really knows. One theory is your body is checking you haven’t died. If your brain isn’t getting info from extremities it sends a signal, the jerk, to establish if it’s still there.
Hypnagogia. The state between awake and asleep. It can do some weird things to a person.
[read more here ](https://www.healthline.com/health/hypnagogia#:~:text=Hypnagogia%20is%20the%20transition%20between,to%20hypnagogia%20to%20stimulate%20creativity.)
I read a long time ago that it may date back to when we slept in trees, and that a sense of losing any amount of balance (for whatever reason) would jolt us awake so we didn’t fall from our branch.
I experienced this before I was diagnosed with sleep apnea. You stop breathing long enough for your body to freak out and it feels like your doing the dead cat bounce at the bottom of the cliff.
Not answering the questionas it seems to have been answered and explained in the comments, but I have a (hopefully) humorous anecdote:
My boyfriend is *very* skittish, and one night I must have have the same kind of random jerk in my sleep. I woke up to my boyfriend screaming out.
A half hour later the paramedics were round diagnosing him with a mild concussion. The silly twat had jumped so badly at my hypnic jerk that he fell out of bed and nutted the bedside table.
We laugh about it now, but I had a good few days of stank eye off him for that one. Ha ha.
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