How comfortable it is to sleep! You turn off the light, close your tired eyes, lie down quietly, and relax your body little by little. Slowly, your breathing becomes smooth and even, your thoughts begin to blur, until you disappear into the endless darkness... Suddenly, you seem to have tripped over something, stumbled, and fell. Your body shuddered suddenly, your feet kicked, and your heart thumped—huh? What happened? Did you fall asleep on the moving door panel?
No, you just experienced a "sleep twitch".
What are sleep twitches? Sleep twitches, also known as sleep terrors, are a phenomenon that occurs when a person's body goes from being awake to falling asleep. It involves sudden, involuntary muscle twitches, often accompanied by a feeling of falling or free fall. It's a weird muscle spasm that wakes you up suddenly when you're lying in bed and trying to fall asleep because you feel like you've tripped over something.
Sleep jerks are common and generally considered benign.
What causes sleep twitching? No one really knows, it's still a mystery. However, many researchers have put forward their own hypotheses to try to explain this phenomenon. Among them, the following two hypotheses are currently the most favored.
Movement Control Stake Hypothesis
If you dream that you are in a boxing match, will the person sleeping next to you be beaten all over by you? Does he have to have a "complementary" dream where he resists all your jabs and hooks so he can wake up safe and sound? No, he will not be beaten. why? Because when you're asleep, your body is paralyzed (you don't "shoot left and right"). This is due to the presence of what's called "REM sleep flaccidity," which prevents you from putting your dreams into action.
The achalasia works by inhibiting motor neurons - it does this by increasing the electrical current in the brain (the brain sends electrical current to motor neurons to trigger movement). So, for example, the electrical current your brain sends to your fingers (to move them) when you're awake becomes insufficient when you're in REM relaxation. In other words, the same movement of the fingers requires only a little current when awake, and more when in REM relaxation.
The problem now is that you don't have a single switch in your body that inhibits all of your motor neurons at the same time, and the subsystems in your brain that handle the sleep state need to compete for control from the subsystems that handle the awake state. As a result, it sometimes happens that in this game, some motor neurons are randomly fired, causing the body to twitch.
monkey fall hypothesis
Imagine you are a monkey, and as the last rays of sunlight disappear behind the forest, you say to yourself, "It's getting dark, it's time for bed." At this point, your brain starts to secrete melatonin into your blood, and you start yawning.
You're lying on a cozy branch, drowsy -- your eyelids get heavy, your breathing flattens, the outside world begins to fade, sounds distant.
At this point, the "subconscious" part of your brain has the upper hand.
"Perfect!" it said, "time to show the image of the dream." So your brain starts the dream-making process, and just as you're about to fall asleep, it suddenly notices, "Hey, what's wrong with my muscles? Are you all relaxed?"
"Am I lying on a tree? Huh?" Then your brain screams in panic: "Help! Help me! I fell!"
"Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! My God, I'm going to fall to death!" So woke up in "desperation" (twitch)...
well, maybe you've realized that we humans are basically from living and sleeping in Tree primates evolved. This means that we inherit some of their mental inertia, which is no longer of any use.
According to this hypothesis, when you fall from a tree, a reflex wakes you up. You see, when a monkey falls from a tree and is in the air, its muscles no longer need to support any weight from the body, so those muscles become weak. And what's confusing is that your muscles do the same when you're sleeping.
So when you're stumbled into sleep and your muscles are relaxing a little too fast, your groggy brain can sometimes mistake it for a fall from a tree. Your brain then panics and triggers a reflex that scares you awake in an attempt to prepare for your imminent fall to the forest floor - your brain is asleep with little idea that you "no longer" live in a tree .
Which of the two explanations above appeals to you more? Or do you have a more preferred explanation? Whatever the real cause of sleep tics, at least you know that sleep tics are involuntary muscle contractions that occur during the transition from wakefulness to sleep.
This symptom is likely to occur if you drink too much coffee before bed, or if you are stressed, or if you do some strenuous exercise before bed. It is said that about 70% of people have had this experience. But even so, it is still not well understood.
In any case, falling asleep jerks are normal and benign, so you don't need to worry about this phenomenon—except, of course, of kicking someone sleeping next to you.
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