There’s some confusion over the actual definitions of sleeplessness versus insomnia, so I’m going to explain my belief here:

• Sleeplessness is that periodical experience we have when we can’t get a good night’s sleep – it could be due to something on your mind, some stressor, whatever.
• Insomnia is when this sleeplessness becomes persistent. You regularly have a hard time getting to sleep, staying asleep, getting back to sleep once awakened, waking up multiple times a night, waking up early – it has basically become a disorder.

If this second pattern defines your sleep, then I would hazard to guess that you have insomnia … but that’s not all.

There are two different kinds of insomnia, primary and secondary.  The ways to treat each one vary a bit but there are some basic steps you can take to help cure or control it.  My own insomnia type is primary and I have to say, it’s been a two year struggle to try and figure this out!

10 Things You Can Do To Cure Insomnia At Home

Some of these are common practice and common sense, but some are a little more involved. It’s okay if you find some of this a little overwhelming.  The best thing to do in that case is just to pick one of these things and try it.

1. Make your bed only for sleeping. This is to associate the bed with sleep only. If you do this for long enough to make it a habit (some say 30 days, I say even longer), your brain will start to associate bed with sleep. The only exception to this?  Sex.
   
2. Make the bedroom a place of refuge. Keep it neat, cool, dark and quiet. Make sure the bed is comfortable and the blankets or covers are neither too warm or too cool.
3. Get some physical exercise every day. I’ve noticed a marked difference at the 30 minute point – so make it at least 30 minutes/day. Late afternoon seems to work best for me, and I’ve been warned not to exercise within about 3 hours of sleeping – your body warms up too much.
4. Get some daylight early in the morning to cue your brain that it’s time to wake up. If daylight is hard to find (I’m in Vancouver, so in the winter it can be dark and gloomy for days) then make or use a lightbox.
5. Turn off the TV, the computer and the smartphone. All three produce blue light that tells your brain to “wake up”. Make sure these devices are off for at least an hour before bed.
6. Avoid alcohol. It tends to make your sleep more fractured – that means you wake up a lot (even if you don’t realize it) during the night affecting the quality of the sleep you get.
7. Practice basic meditation. This is a more difficult nut to crack – and I’m just trying to crack it now. But most everything I’ve learned comes back to this – learning to meditate means learning to relax. When you’re relaxed, the barriers to sleep are much lower.
8. Listen to the Beat. Along with the meditation, there are certain tones which are supposed to help with insomnia – isochronic or binaural. There are tones that can help with basic meditation too.
9. Do some fine tuning with eating and drinking. Lots of water during the day is a good thing for a number of reasons. Research what you eat in the evening after dinner and find out whether it’s a known sleep enhancer or sleep stealer.
10. Know Your Suppiments. I’m not a huge fan of this, but many are and swear by it so I’ll mention it here. There are natural plants which are said to aid sleep such as Valarian, chamomile, lavender, and calamus and others. I don’t know whether this is more placebo than actual effect, so do your research into the effects and side-effects of any suppliments before taking them.
    

If these basic steps don’t work for you, then I would suggest that maybe it’s a combination of the above that will conquer the insomnia. Gather some data – start a sleep log or, better yet, grab yourself a sleep monitor (I use a Zeo) and start to evaluate your sleep. I’m actually well into this stage myself, as I couldn’t correlate what I did with how well I slept – it seemed to be all over the place.

Using the Zeo, I’ve now determined that it’s the deep sleep part of the night that fluctuates most, and has the most effect on my total sleep – so I’m trying out different combinations of stuff (exercise, light in the AM, meditation, eating light carbs late in the evening) to see what does what to the deep sleep.

Curing Your Insomnia Can Only Happen In One Place – Home

The only place where you will ever cure insomnia is at home.

There’s no such thing as going to your doctor, or to get a sleep study, and being told the problem(s) that you have, and leaving with a pill that solves everything. I would suggest that the pill will probably cause just as many problems as it solves – and I speak from some experience.

Nope, the only solution is the one that you find your yourself at home … the eventual “cure” will be a natural one, and it will probably come down to some new habits that you will adopt along the way.

Given that we inhabit a planet with a 24 hour day, it is no surprise that our bodies have become roughly linked with the day/night cycle, with various hormones being released at certain stages in the rhythm enticing us to sleep or wake.

Photo coutesy of Hypnagogia blog

Not everyone’s rhythm is the same, some people have theirs shifted (such as when you are jet lagged). Even a skew of an hour or two can make a huge difference to how easily you are able to wake up for work in the morning, or how late you can stay awake.

There are a couple of online questionnaires to help you determine your own circadian rhythm; I took one from Phillips and the other from the BBC.

Both of these decided that my rhythm was skewed, so I decided to make my own measurements and chart them here but after seeing the first 24 hours of data, something interesting emerged…

Establishing Your Circadian Baseline

This is a normal circadian rhythm taken from the Philips website.

Normal Circadian Rhythm

In fact, this is a simplified rhythm, because it is normal to have a small dip in the energy levels around mid afternoon, hence the reason for many countries having an afternoon siesta, and the reason why we tend to slump at our desks in the mid afternoon and reach for a cup of coffee.

This dip can be seen in my graph from the BBC circadian test.

BBC Graph

Core body temperature is a good way of charting your own rhythm because energy levels are reflected by our temperature. Our body temperature is not a static 37.5 C, in fact it fluctuates throughout the day inline with our circadian rhythm. Of course, it is also affected by ambient temperature and how active we are.

So, all it would take to chart my own rhythm would be a decent thermometer.

The Things We Do For Science

I decided to get a data-logging thermometer, so that I could see what was happening while I was asleep.

I ordered a thermometer capable of recording every 10 seconds (to weed out anomalous readings), and was expecting the probe to be a small thermocouple-type sensor that I could stick to the skin under my arm, but the probe was more like a bullet and wasn’t adhesive plus the logger turned out to be a lot bigger than it looked in the photo!

I’d gone this far, so in the name of science, I shaved under my arm and fixed the probe there with Melonin (low adhesive dressing) and Tegaderm (a clear waterproof adhesive dressing). I then wedged the cables into my suit and went off to work.

After 24 hours (and a few weird looks) I downloaded the data to a computer. I noticed that generally the pattern was the same as that belonging to “normal” people, but that it had a few fairly severe drops in temp during the night.

I repeated this over several days.

On the graph below, the dip is around 1:30pm and again at 4:00pm. I suspect the 1:30pm dip is my normal afternoon energy dip whilst the 4:00pm dip is environmental because I was working outside at 4:00pm.

Temperature drop in REM Detailed 24h

It’s also interesting that the temperature drops around 8pm. That’s pretty much when I start to look forward to sleep!

It plateaus at 10pm for a couple of hours in a similar way to the one produced by my answers to the BBC link. This may have been because I was already asleep by then!

I repeated this the following day and the dip was much more pronounced again early at around noon, but I ended the recording early as it was becoming awkward to carry the data-logger around with me, so I can’t show a full 48 hour graph.

I also noticed that the drops in temperature during sleep are the most severe.

Noticable Temperature Drops During Sleep

If You Can Repeat it, it’s Science

When I first saw them, I suspected that they were erroneous readings, but the probe was stuck so tightly to me that there was no way that these were due to poor contact (after all, if that were the case, why didn’t this happen during the day when there was more movement?).

However, as the data rate on the logger was so high (240 recordings an hour), these were clearly not erroneous as they slowly crept back up to the plateau level of around 36.5°C.

I wasn’t happy with this result, so I repeated it the following night. The drops in temperature were still there.

On the second night, to eliminate the possibility that these variations were due to environmental changes, my room temperature was monitored with another probe, and it was a surprisingly constant 18°C  for most of the night, so there were no corresponding dips in room temperature. I don’t like my bedroom to be too warm so I switch the heating off at night.

I took a look at my sleep-stage data using the Zeo, and was surprised that the seemingly random falls in temperature coincided with awakenings from REM! (Shown as orange “wake periods” on the coloured graph, but as REM/Wake on the detailed graph).

Temperature drop in REM Detailed 24h

So what’s going on?

Unwrapping the Mysteries of REM

Along with the muscle paralysis that comes with REM sleep (to stop us acting out our dreams), there is also a decrease in the body’s ability to regulate its temperature (thermoregulation).  During REM this decrease in ability to regulate our temperature causes us to be largely “Poikilothermic” (meaning that our temperature is governed by the temperature of our environment).

So, it seems that my temperature was dropping, causing me to wake in order to regulate my temperature, pretty much in the same way that my apneas cause me to wake during REM.

If this is true then it means that in order to be able to stay asleep during REM I now have two issues to deal with: apneas AND temperature!

So the key to eliminating this issue is to regulate the temperature of my bedroom better.

I repeated this for two more days, and then concentrated on the nights and gathered more data (total of 5 nights).

It seems that these overnight drops in temperature aren’t always correlated with REM sleep (sometimes they are just before and sometimes just after), so until my more accurate thermometer arrives, I decided to calculate the mean temperature from the week’s recordings to get a better idea of my rhythm and to try to eliminate the overnight drops.

Mean 24 hour Body Temperature

This gives a much nicer picture and goes some way to reducing the environmental effects. The data fits well with how I feel throughout the day. I tend to get a bit tired at 1pm, then start considering bed around 8-9pm.

Compared to the BBC graph, it lines up fairly well, although my “energy drop” happens earlier in the day at a more accurate time.

24 Hour Body Temperature with Circadian Rhythm

All that said, I’m not comfortable with this experiment as there is much that could be improved on:

• Better temperature sensor (on it’s way)
• Eliminate environmental temperature effects (maybe on a day where I stay at home)
• I still am not convinced whether these changes in temperature are an effect of activity. After all, it stands to reason that when we are more active our bodies produce more heat, so it would be interesting to do this on a day where I forced myself to do nothing, stayed at home and forced myself to stay awake past my usual bedtime, that way I could see whether these changes are still evident on the graph. That said, some of the nights were recorded with an 11pm bedtime although my temperature still dropped as usual around 8pm, so it could be accurate.

One thing that it has shown me is that it is essential to have your sleeping environment just right for you…

A good sleep routine involves making sure that your bedroom is the right temperature.

It should be cool but not cold. In days gone by, the outside temperature dropping in the evening acted as a cue for our ancestors’ bodies to sleep. Of course, in days where our homes are heated, this confuses the body and can lead to poor sleep.

The same is true with light.

Nowadays we have artificial light filling our homes and offices, and that also interferes with our sleep/wake cycle as we don’t receive the nighttime cues.

So sunlight during the day and a cool, dark bedroom goes some way to remedying this.

A nightcap helps you sleep, right?

Well, yes…but not they way you think it does.

During my initial explorations with the flow-meter, I thought that I’d test my set-up by trying to INCREASE my AHI using a well known substance that makes sleep apnea worse:

Alcohol.

A sleep experiment where I get to have a drink or three… it’s tough, but I’ll do it for science.

Alcohol Increases Your Risk of Sleep Apnea

Pretty much as it does with people, alcohol relaxes the muscles in the airways making them more prone to flopping around all over the place and causing an obstruction.

When it comes to the rest of the practices, gadgets, fads and ideas that I’ll be exploring I’ll be testing them for 5 days in a row each. To be honest I’m not going to do that with alcohol as I can’t afford a week of waking up sluggish and groggy.  However, what I did was to take 5 non-consecutive days approach instead.

I consumed alcohol and recorded my AHI on those nights along with my 5 day no-alcohol mean AHI for comparison.

Pretty conclusive.

Alcohol increased the number of times that I either stopped breathing or breathed so little that it was ineffective.
Not only that, but it did it in quite a startling way. It took my 5 day mean AHI from 6.95 to 12.2.(max 15.3) To get that into perspective, that’s nearly double the number of times PER HOUR that I had breathing problems.

As discussed in this post, I went from just scraping in with a diagnosis of “Mild Obstructive Sleep Apnoea” to being firmly in the category!

Surely there was something positive to salvage from this bad news?

Yes.

In my mind, alcohol helped me to get to sleep and I found that the Zeo data backed that up. Again, using a 5 day mean value, my time to sleep onset (or Zeo’s “Time to Z”) went from 28 minutes without alcohol down to 9 with alcohol.

That seemed to be the only significant difference in the data, so I haven’t bothered to clutter the page with other measurements.

My time to Z decreased significantly ... but my AHI increased as well.

It may help you to get to sleep, but the chances are that the sleep will not be good sleep. The chances are that it will be disturbed sleep, the chances of having to go to the bathroom will increase, as will the likelihood of dehydration-related headaches and fragmented sleep towards the morning.

Not only would I wake up feeling slow and mildly hungover, but I’d be tired from being woken up up to 15 times an hour through apneas.

Don’t misunderstand me; this isn’t one of those damning posts about alcohol, but it is something to bear in mind if you already suffer with sleep apnea, and it may even cause mild apnea in people who don’t have it.

Will I continue to drink alcohol? Of course – and that’s the dilemma. So I guess the answer is “everything in moderation.”

Making sure that teenagers get enough sleep is a daunting task.

Today, teenagers have a myriad of demands to stay awake and cheat sleep, such as job commitments, school work, family obligations and the powerful distracting force of the Internet.

School is just one of the many stresses deal with.

While excessive daytime sleepiness and a hindered ability to focus and excel in school are a few of the more obvious detriments to a lack of sleep, recent studies have found that teenagers might need their rest even more than we thought.

In 2007, the Centers for Disease Control conducted a comprehensive survey of over 12,000 students, the finding of which has now been released. The survey given by the researchers also asked questions about a wide range of behaviors that posed health risks. Students who indicated sleeping more than 8 hours on average, and students who indicated sleeping under 8 hours were divided into two distinct categories.

After examining the data along these lines, researchers saw a disturbing trend:

Students with a noticeable sleep deficiency were substantially more likely to participate in high-risk behaviors.

How Bad Is It?

When receiving less than 8 hours of sleep, teenagers were more likely to engage in the following-

• Serious consideration of suicide
• Avoid exercising for 60 minutes a day
• Engaging in sexual activity
• Consumption of alcohol
• Smoking cigarettes
• Smoking marijuana
• Depression
• Participating in fist fights
• Spending over 3 hours a day on the computer

Alarmingly, it seemed that a sleep deficit was the norm, with more than two thirds of the students reporting sleeping less than 8 hours.

The strong correlation between a lack of sleep and high-risk behavior don’t necessarily indicate a concrete causal relationship, but they do depict an upsetting trend.

Why This Happens

Due to their still-developing brain teenagers are considerably more susceptible to risky behaviors than adults with the same amount of sleep deficit. The underdeveloped social and emotional skills of teenagers make it more likely for them to display extreme emotional behavior.

Sleepy teens end up being "that guy" more often than well-rested teens.

Another contributing factor is the change in circadian rhythm brought on by puberty. In contrast to rigid work and school schedules, many teenagers stay awake well into the night due to their inability to sleep, both due to a shifting circadian rhythm and external factors.

In addition teens require more sleep than adults. The National Sleep Foundation estimates 85% of teenagers are failing to reach the recommended 8.5 to 9.25 hours of sleep per night. Teenagers are often subjected to early start times for school that only serve to further exacerbate their already substantial sleep deficit.

A failure to address the poor sleeping habits of a teenager can potentially lead to decreases in cognitive efficiency and ability. In addition, sleep-deprived teenagers can exhibit behaviors typically associated with other cognitive and developmental issues, such as ADHD, potentially leading to a misdiagnosis.

Of course, for those teens who exhibiting decreased cognitive capacity and changes in behavior regardless of the amount of sleep obtained, an analysis at a sleep lab can pinpoint any potentially underlying sleep disorders.

What You Can Do To Help Your Teen

Whatever the case may be, it’s imperative that parents, educators, and employers recognize the signs of sleep deficiency and act accordingly in order to ensure their child decreases susceptibility to high-risk behavior and is able to perform to the best of their ability.

Things as simple as picking (and helping to enforce) a set bedtime and teaching good sleep hygiene habits will go a long way in helping teenagers get the sleep they need – and stay safe in the process.

Talk with your teenager about their sleep habits - no matter what difficulties you might face.

]]> http://blog.myzeo.com/teenage-sleep-deprivation-dont-do-it/feed/ 0 http://blog.myzeo.com/sharing-is-caring-announcing-the-zeo-featured-blogger-project/ http://blog.myzeo.com/sharing-is-caring-announcing-the-zeo-featured-blogger-project/#comments Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:57:18 +0000 Andi@Zeo http://blog.myzeo.com/?p=5391 ]]>

There’s great stuff out in the internet.

The problem is that you need to find it.

Sure, a quick search can do wonders, but how often do you find really amazing stuff simply by typing in a keyword or phrase?

Chances are, the really great stuff – the sites you bookmark and check out all the time – came to you via a friend or someone you trust.  They just instinctively knew that you would enjoy that link.

Sharing is Caring

You’re not really friends with someone who’s stingy.  You might be nice or polite to them, but chances are, they’re not going to be the first person you tell about something new, fun, or exciting.

Those who you are friends with, now they’re the ones you send a quick email off to with that great tidbit.  You want to get their opinion on something you read, or just share a laugh over the latest viral video.  And because you took the opportunity to share something you liked with them, they respond in kind.  Pretty soon, you’re swapping information and advice so quickly it seems that you’re always getting something awesome.

We’re here to do the same with with you about sleep .  It’s such a big (and admittedly nebulous) topic that it’s easy to miss all the good stuff out there (and there’s a lot out there).  So to help you out, we’re going to up our content sharing with you – and remove some of the legwork on your end.

How?

Starting today, we’re going to feature four (4) awesome sleep posts by a non-Zeo writer each month,  as part of an initiative called “Zeo Featured Blogger.”  These posts will be published in the Knowledge Center each week, and pushed out to you via our RSS feed.  To get your hands on this as soon as it’s published (and again, save that whole “searching” business), subscribe here.

What’s on tap for December

This month, we’re featuring stellar content from Hypnagogia, a blog devoted to exploring what really goes on in our bodies while we sleep.  If you ever wanted to see how sleep apnea data corresponds to Zeo data, you don’t want to miss their first post “Apnoeas, Me?  My Baseline AHI“.

Here’s a quick taste; you can find the full post here:

I also noticed that when the oxygen desaturations due to apneas were compared to the Zeo hypnogram, that like my son’s, they were clustered around REM sleep.

The top line is my oxygen level

Remember:  to get each post as it comes out, subscribe to our Knowledge Center feed here.  You’ll get piping hot content each week, not junk, ads, or any other obnoxious pieces of spam.

How You Can Join in the Fun

Great friends share.  Sure, it might take a little bit to get started but after you do it a few times, it comes naturally.

As a company, we’ve (publically) been in the sharing business for two years.  Like most newbies, we first thought that we could do it all for ourselves, all by ourselves, all the time.  But if you’re just sticking to what you do, that’s not really sharing; that’s bragging.

We don’t want to toot our own horn.   We want to toot your horn.

We want to share your stuff here, as a Featured Blogger.

This initiative to all of you who write about sleep.  If you have a great idea that you want to share with others, tell us.  We’ll help you out by publishing your find here on myZeo.com.  We’re not asking to own your content, or have exlusive rights to it, or pass it off as our own.  No.  We just want to share your good news, your great find, with others.

This is your chance to reach all of your friends in the sleep community.  To get extra insight into what people like you think, and how they’re unlocking their own sleep mysteries and discoveries.

You don’t even need to have a Zeo; just a story, a question, or part of a journey.

To particpate in the great share, send a quick email to mystory@myzeo.com with a link to your blog or site, and a quick into about what you want to share.  I’ll personally read and respond to each email; I’m looking forward to reading what you send.

Again, you don’t need a Zeo to write about sleep, or even share a great story.  Just send us an email – and thanks for sharing!

Andi (ZQ: 86) is the editor of Zeology and the Zeo Knowledge Center. By tweet or by post, email or Expert Answer, she makes sure people get the information they need about sleep.

We hear a lot of stories here at Zeo.

Some are straightforward. Some are complex.

Some are mindblowing.

Recently, a Zeo user named Joel B. wrote to us and told us how his wife’s life improved after her sleep improved.  Their story falls into the “mindblowing” category.

Here’s Joel’s story:

For perhaps 6-8 months, possibly more, my wife had been showing signs of cognitive impairment. Memory loss, lack of ‘presence,’ unable to follow complex instructions, etc. It was bad enough that a few weeks ago when a new client asked her our address, she couldn’t remember.

She also developed a bilateral hand tremor so we went from her internist to a neurologist. I’d noticed that she had taken to snoring, and my thought (with which the neurologist agreed) was that it could be obstructive sleep apnea.

So we did the whole sleep study routine, and yes indeed, she had obstructive sleep apnea. Tried CPAP, she couldn’t stand it. She switched to Provent (small nasal strips with a one-way valve that restricts exhalation to raise pressure in the oral cavity and thus do some or all of what a CPAP machine does). That eliminated the snoring, and a recording pulse oximeter showed improved oxygenation. Great!

But her cognition didn’t improve.

I then bought the Zeo, to see if she had a more or less normal sleep pattern. Well, lo and behold, after about 2-3 weeks of measurements, my wife had registered a grand total of no REM sleep.

Zero.

Not one minute in the entire period.

Since my wife was on antidepressants, I thought that might have something to do with her issue. So I decided it was time to hit the research literature.  Fortunately, I’ve had training as a medical writer and researcher, so this wasn’t unfamiliar territory for me.

In poking around, I came across info that that said that SSRI (a.k.a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) antidepressant drugs suppress–often entirely–REM sleep. As I delved further into the literature, I found robust support for this.

Apparently, it’s a well-known (if rarely mentioned) side effect of the antidepressants. I contacted an old grad school friend, Joe Graedon. He immediately said that not only do the SSRIs suppress REM as I’d seen in the literature, but so do ALL the antidepressants, including the first generation ones.

It seems that in order to have REM sleep, you have to deplete serotonin (and have melatonin kick in) and if you’re on an antidepressant, the antidepressant is upping your serotonin levels, thus lowering your melatonin levels, which is counterproductive to getting good REM sleep. “So, with the approval of my wife’s physician, we started to slowly ween her off her medication.

For about three weeks, nothing dramatic happened. A week ago yesterday, she woke up one morning and within minutes I knew she was ‘back.’ She was just remarkably different. Much more animated, much more engaged, much livelier.

And SHE knew the difference.

That night she used Zeo again and she showed about 10 minutes of REM sleep.

Hooray! Not huge, but at least SOMETHING.

It has continued to increase, up to 15 minutes two nights ago, 20 minutes the night before last, and 45 minutes last night!

She has continued to be much more energetic, totally present and responsive, with her memory working as it should. The hand tremors also entirely disappeared.

Again, research literature points out that antidepressant drugs can have a noticable affect on sleep quality.

NONE of the doctors raised the meds as a possibility. The sleep study center should have mentioned it in their report. The neurologist should have flagged it.

Without Zeo, we would not have had the information we needed. Since tapering down the medication, my wife’s been consistently getting some REM every night.

We’re hoping that this trend will continue – and that our experiences will help others.

Tell Us Your Story

We love stories like this because it reinforces what we believe:

“When you know your sleep, you can change your sleep.”

Joel’s wife, for example, wasn’t getting good REM sleep because she was on antidepressants.  However, that wasn’t even considered as a root cause.

Only after seeing her Zeo sleep data did the light bulb go on.  Her sleep issues were not what they (and doctors) originally thought.  Armed with this information, Joel and his wife were able to make small but meaningful changes – and reap the benefits of good sleep.

We also believe in the power of personal experiences to guide others. After all, what hinders my sleep could be completely different from what hinders another person’s sleep.

While you might not have the same experience as Joel or his wife, someone else might.

That’s why we’re always asking for your story.  Your own experience, however humble, could be someone’s light bulb; their “ah-ha” moment.

So we want to know:

What was it like when you first looked at your sleep data?

Post it in the comments, share it on Facebook, or email it directly to us at mystory@myzeo.com.

We look forward to reading about your experiences and learning from what you’ve discovered.

Thanks for sharing!

Keith (Ave ZQ: 97) is a writer and member of the Zeo Marketing team. When it comes to sleep, he’s a Viking.

Being tired isn’t exactly out of the ordinary for most people. It’s totally understandable to be tired once in a while, but being tired every day probably isn’t a very good sign. Especially if you’re getting a full night’s sleep.

If you routinely get the recommended 7-9 hours of sleep and still feel particularly exhausted during the day, there’s a possibility that you have sleep apnea.

But what exactly is sleep apnea and how does it affect your quality of life?

Intro to Sleep Apnea

Sleep apnea, specifically Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA), is characterized by the blockage of the upper airway while you sleep. The blockage is caused by a relaxation of the soft tissue in the back of your throat, which blocks your airways and causes cessations in breathing.

What Causes Sleep Apnea

This in turn leads to more frequent awakenings and, possibly, less time in more restorative sleep phases due to the fact that your sleep is constantly interrupted, which in turn leaves you feeling fatigued the next day.

Ever get the sense that something’s watching you while you’re asleep? Or that there’s some thing in the room? Perhaps it’s under the bed or standing over you?

Perhaps it even looks something like this:

If so don’t worry; you’re not crazy.   What you’re experiencing is what’s known as Sleep Paralysis (SP).  It’s when you think you’re awake but you’re physically unable to move.  You might also see wild, fantastical and sometimes frightning things, or feel as though something is pushing down on you.

What’s really going on is that some features of REM sleep – such as full body paralysis and dreams – are intruding into Light sleep or even Wake.  However, long before EEG, humans of all cultures attributed these sensations to those of ghosts, goblins, witches, and other supernatural beings.

Just in time for Halloween, we teamed up with dream researcher Ryan Hurd to create this inforgraphic which looks into the mythological underpinnings of Sleep Paralysis.  That alien encounter your neighbor said he had last week?  Before there were aliens, people used to report similar instances but said they were “fairy encounters.”

To look at it in all it’s creepy glory, just click on the image below.  It shouldn’t be too scary…but it’s okay to sleep with the light on if you need to.

Andi (ZQ: 86) is the editor of Zeology. By tweet or by post, email or Expert Answer, she makes sure people get the information they need about sleep.

It happened precisely at 7:34 am.

I fell back asleep and felt my body become paralyzed. Then I sat up, and felt “myself” lift out of my physical body. I floated above my bed and melted into the window. I entered the thin pane of the glass and hovered inside its boundaries.

Pictoral representation of an OBE

Then I woke up.

What I experienced was an out-of-body experience (OBE). These experiences happen all over the world and their descriptions are similar across cultures. In new age circles, the experience is known as astral projection whereas more indigenous cultures call it soul flight.  Some instances are spontaneous while others are initiated through ritual dancing and drumming.

What all these traditions have in common is the insistence that out-of-body experiences are real, and some part of “you” moves away from our material existence, having a life of its own. Having had many realistic OBEs, I can respect that worldview.

But what exactly is an OBE?  If they happen cross-culturally, what exactly is going on inside someone during an OBE?

When is a Dream not a Dream?

Scientific interest in the physical underpinnings of OBEs supports what dream researchers have suspected for years, namely that most out-of-body experiences occur when you are falling asleep or coming out of sleep.

According to my Zeo, at precisely the time when I was floating above my bed, my brain was in REM sleep.   This supports what Kevin Nelson MD noticed, namely that OBEs come with REM sleep.

OBE - Zeo caught it

Yet an OBE is not “just a dream.”  The realistic sensation of moving out and/or away from the physical body “feels” real because the mind is alert and thinking clearly while simultaneously aware of the sensation of bodily paralysis that normally comes with REM sleep.

Swiss researcher Olaf Blanke suggested that the cause of OBEs can be traced to a breakdown in communication in a part of the brain known as the temporoparietal junction, or the TPJ.

Location of the TJP region of the brain

The TPJ essentially acts as a bridge that links body sensations from the vestibular system (your balance and spacial orientation system) with visual information and higher order thinking processes from the prefrontal cortex. When the bridge collapses, our sense of self is untethered from the constraints of the senses.  Hence, that “floating” sensation.

Vestibular System

No Sleep Required

While most OBEs are instigated from sleep (I have had dozens of them through my experimentation with sleep paralysis),  they can be spontaneously generated as a result of life stresses such as shock, illness, and trauma.

German philosopher Thomas Metzinger believes that the evolutionary origin of the OBE is shock, as part of the paralysis reflex in mammals when attacked by prey. As carnivores don’t like to eat dead animals due to the risk of contamination, animals who “play dead” are more likely to survive a sudden attack.

I wonder if the gazelle has an OBE when being eaten by a lion? It’s a tempting idea.

Gazelle: Think happy thoughts /Think happy thoughts

Perhaps one of the best example of an OBE due to shock or trauma is that associated with a Near Death Experience (NDE).  It’s been postulated that those who have NDEs are also more likely to have sleep paralysis and out-of-body experiences, with the implication being that REM sleep plays a role in all three.

REM intrusions in Sleep Transitions and Near Death Experiences

However, just like ritualized OBEs in more indigenous cultures, many who have had a NDE report a positive effect, impacting their lives for decades after the event.  Far from inducing terror and fear, the experience actually give them extraordinary insight.  As such, many Dream researchers (myself included) suggest that OBEs could be integrated into counseling efforts.

Personally, my OBEs have been less sublime (floating in a window, while neat, didn’t yield any mind blowing insight) but the experience is certainly up there with one of the strangest things that might happen while asleep.

Ryan Hurd is a dream researcher, educator, and a contributing sleep expert to Zeology. He is editor of DreamStudies.org and author of the ebook Sleep Paralysis: A Dreamer’s Guide.