Relax your muscles and mind with a warm shower as you get ready for bed. The warm water soothes your body and can help induce sleep afterwards. Showering an hour before getting into bed allows your body enough time to cool down.
Although the demon itself is not real, the experience of hallucination of a sleep paralysis demon can be horrifying enough to have lasting effects on your sleep. If you endure the sleep paralysis demon phenomenon often, you may understandably develop a fear of going to bed, which could then lead to and even long-term . Both insomnia and anxiety are associated with experiencing sleep paralysis demons.
You’re asleep in bed when suddenly, you’re jolted awake. Now staring at the ceiling, you realize, you can’t move your arms or legs and standing in the corner? A scary looking creature you can’t quite put your finger on. Or even worse, you wake up and it’s sitting right on top of you. Not to worry though, the demon isn’t real. Enter a condition known as sleep paralysis.
Fear gets amplified in this state. The intense terror likely occurs because the amygdala, known as the fear center of the brain, is highly activated during REM sleep. The hyperactivity of the amygdala is why dreams can be so intense. Throughout the waking day, if you encounter a potential threat, you can quickly assess whether the threat is legitimate and react accordingly, thanks to your brain’s logic-regulating abilities of the pre-frontal cortex, which is dormant while you sleep. But during REM sleep, your brain lacks the information to correctly assess whether a threat is real. So, during a “visit” from a sleep paralysis demon, nothing reassures you that it’s only a dream.
