I have cured my own sleep paralysis, and you can too.
I no longer fear waking. My entire life, I have dealt with sleep paralysis. If you don’t know, sleep paralysis is a condition where you wake, terrified, unable to move. Wikipedia has a good article on it, as usual. I just learned to live with it up until a few years ago. I was living with my future wife, who would see me hyperventilating, and shake me awake. At this point, I was just happy I didn’t have to lay there in fear. Time passed, and I began to feel bad for those who didn’t have wives to wake them up. I also worried it would happen on a business trip or vacation. The answer, as usual, was staring me right in the face.
Everyone should get married! Ha. No, the clue was the sound I always heard when this happened. The sound of my own terrified heartbeat. That was it. When in the throws of sleep paralysis, your heart rate increases.
I immediately went out and bought a cheap heart-rate monitor with vibration. I bought mine here in koreatown cheap at an import store. They are also available cheaply online for around 30$. Oregon scientific makes an excellent one thats around 40$. I would have paid a fortune. It works like a charm. My heart rate increases, the vibration alert goes off, and IT JOLTS ME AWAKE. Bam. I thought about patenting the idea, but you can’t really patent the use of a device that already exists, so I’m posting it here and letting the world know. I don’t know if it will work for everyone, but it works for me.
Awesome. I am really suffering with sleep paralysis right now. I am going out first thing tomorrow to buy a heart monitor. Thank you.
Good luck. Let me know if the stock heart monitor doesn’t work for you, as I’ve been meaning to do a tutorial on adding an additional vibration motor to a heart monitor.
What a neat concept. If this gets rid of the night terror I’ll wear it to bed.
That sounds brilliant. I suffered from sleep paralysis for about 5 years.
I changed to a less stressful job.
I changed my diet to a lot less sugar and a lot less carbs and made sure to drink a lot more water – which also had a correlation with my episodes – but that just might be my own personal metabolism.
If it ever returns (NOOOOOO) that I’ll try out your device!
That’s quite interesting! I switched to a (slightly) less stressful job recently myself, and have not yet noticed a change in frequency of occurrences. I have not considered it may be metabolism related, though that is a good premise and it’s got me thinking. Thanks for the hello.
I have been suffering from sleep paralysis since as long as i can remember. If i had to make an educated guess it would be at the age of eight. Now I am 16 turning 17 years old. It has recently become more frequent and more serious. I never thought of using a heart rate monitor. Sounds like a good conclusion. I’ve done some research on it and have found you can out grow it in some cases. The reason we have sleep paralysis is because of delays of brains receptors. One is a wake receptor and the other is a dream. Could explain our trouble sleeping. Before you awake the dream receptor is still active and the wake receptor is not full active. Therefor you hallucinate and see things that are not real.
Thank you so much for posting this, I’ve never suffered from sleep paralysis but some of family has and I’ll be telling them about this tactic as soon as I finish commenting. Thank you so much.
I dont know why you guys dont like sleep paralysis, its a wonderful gift, people spends months and years trying to attain it as it is the first stage of O.B.E or out of body experinces. which is also closley related to lucid dreaming. if you learn to turn the bad energy into good nergy you will be very happy.
Pretty sure it’s not.
Very interesting, going to give it a try. I’ve suffered from sleep paralysis for about 5 years now. Mostly when I nap during the afternoon or wake up early and drift back to sleep), and it’s gradually becoming more frequent. I often catch myself in it, struggling to wake up.
My question is kind of complex and I wanted your opinion on it, I just what’s been ruled as “benign PACs”, we the atrium chambers of the heart produce extra beats and mis-fire occasionally, but I’ve had every test imaginable done and everything came back clear, there’s nothing wrong with my heart. I’ll occasionally feel a skip, followed by a hard thud in my chest, then heart rate is back to normal almost before I even realized what happened. Anyways, now I think this is do to the “dream receptor” effect as aforementioned, but on two separate occasions now, while in sleep paralysis, I have felt (or convinced myself) that I was having an irregular heartbeat. Where my pulse was rapid and all over the place, I even felt the fluttering in my chest. But both times when I awoke, my pulse was completely calm and normal, leading me to believe this was caused by a dream. This has never happened to me when I have been awake, never more then one little skip, but during paralysis it felt like it was ongoing for 30 seconds or so. I’m wondering if you think this was just me dreaming (because I constantly think and worry about the PACs, even though I’ve been told nothing is wrong with me), or if you think there’s a chance that during sleep paralysis I could be going into irregular heart rhythms?
Thank You,
Mike
Hey Mike,
That’s a tough question. I can’t say whether your heart is skipping or not (or whether you’re dreaming it or something else is occurring) with any certainty.
Let me ask you this, do you have an iPod or Android phone? If so, I say drop some cash on a heart rate monitor attachment and find out for certain what is going on. It may take days or weeks for you to get a definitive statistically significant answer, but then you’ll have one and you can share that data with your doctors if need be.
Best of luck!
/H