Replied by Nj (Melb, Australia) on 12/13/2011

I started suffering from sleep paralysis approximately 2 years ago. Needless to say I was terrified by the episodes as I had never experienced them before. Especially since as well as the paralysis, I also experienced from the common hallucinations that some people also suffer.

It happened to me a few times before I worked up the courage to search online for an explanation. And I was quite relieved to find that the paralysis (as well as the hallucinations) were fairly common.

I found a great tip on one of these websites for pulling yourself out of the paralysis if it occurs and that's to start my trying to move smaller muscles first. Most of us start struggling and try to move big muscles like our arms, but it's far more effective to try and move smaller muscles like wiggling your toes or your little finger to wake your body up. This decreased my stress exponentially, for starters I had an explanation for what was happening and an effective way of bringing myself out of it.

As for preventing them in the first place, apparently they are far more common when sleeping on your back, which is what I was doing at the time that this all started. So one of the first things I did was to start sleeping on my side, and putting a couple of pillows behind me so that if I rolled in my sleep I wouldn't go fully onto my back.

This seemed to work and it got to the point where I was rarely having them, but now I want to start sleeping again on my back. For purely vain reasons - I don't like the pillow-wrinkles on my face in the morning, nor the wrinkle-crease in my cleavage. And sure enough I've had a couple of episodes in the past week since I've been sleeping on my back.

So I'm now looking for other ways to prevent them. I've read things like decreasing stress, but I haven't noticed a correlation between stress and the episodes in the past.

Great idea starting a sleep paralysis section on earth clinic. Let me know if you find any effective cures and hopefully others will join in with their experiences.

Replied by Christy (Spartanburg, South Carolina) on 01/27/2012

Replied by John From Thailand (Trang) on 01/02/2014

Replied by Bon (Usa) on 06/29/2017

Replied by Tom (Los Angeles) on 06/29/2017

I have terrible sleep apnea and would like to know what type of Probiotics helped you. Please advise.

Thanks, Tom