Can You Sneeze While You Sleep? Common Question And Answers Update 11/2024

Why Do We Sneeze?

1. The nasal mucosa get contaminated with foreign particles. First, they’ll need to remove all of the hair from your nose. Instead of complaining about your nose hair, you should be grateful to it because it prevents many sneezes from reaching your lungs.
2. This can happen if you irritate the nerve endings in your face enough (for example, by tweezing your eyebrows or tickling the roof of your mouth).
3. In people who carry a gene called photic sneeze reflex, intense light, especially sunlight, causes them to sneeze.

You’d think there’d be more going on, but in the end, those are the only two that matter.

Can We Sneeze While Sleeping?

How Do We Sneeze?

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When you sneeze, you’re expelling allergens and other irritants from your nasal passages and throat. It’s an automatic response triggered by any particle, allergen or otherwise, entering the nasal cavity. The hair in your nostrils is your body’s first line of defense against invading particles.

Some of these particles may still pass through to the nasal mucosa, where they might cause the production of the neurotransmitter histamines. Histamines are chemical substances consisting mostly of nitrogen particles that irritate nerve endings in the nasal mucous membranes and cause swelling. This triggers a chain reaction that culminates in a sneeze by activating the brain’s reflexes, which send signals to the pharyngeal and tracheal muscles to widen the nostril and tracheal openings.

Does Sleep Prevent Sneezing?

Lying on one’s side, back, or stomach can cause swelling of the mucous membranes, which can then cause a sneeze. Experts in the field of sleep science and neuroscience, however, argue that sneezing is impossible while one is asleep.

Each of the four cycles that make up a typical night’s sleep consists of three Non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) stages and one Rapid Eye Movement (REM) stage (REM). Seventy-five percent of the time we spend asleep is in NREM sleep, while the remaining 25 percent is in REM sleep.

• The first stage of sleep is a light sleep where awakening is easy. Your eye movements slow down, and you feel your muscles loosening and contracting.
• The second stage of sleep is characterized by the cessation of eye movement and the beginning of the slowing of the heart rate and temperature that characterizes deep sleep. As this phase progresses, so do the brain’s alpha waves.
• In stage 3, the body’s blood pressure decreases and rapid brain waves are interspersed with slower delta waves, ushering in the slumbering state known as deep sleep. There is a sense of disorientation at first awakening.
• Dreaming when awake, or REM sleep. The eyelids are still closed, but the eyes are darting left and right quite a bit. While the body sleeps, the mind is active, producing brain waves that reflect the reactions to waking events or dreams. This is the phase where the majority of dreams occur. Because your mind is active, you often recall specifics from your dreams. In contrast, sneezing is not possible when in this stage of sleep since it leads to REM atonia.

The medical term “atonia” describes a condition in which muscles completely lose their strength. During rapid eye movement (REM) atonia, the body is unconscious and the muscles are completely relaxed while the mind is wide awake. At this point, the neurotransmitters are down, so even if an allergen or particle makes it through the nasal passages and onto the mucous membranes, it won’t set off histamine release. During rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, a sneeze cannot be induced because histamine levels are very low.

There is no atonia during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, therefore technically a sneeze could occur at any time. Here, however, the cerebral cortex and thalamus region of the brain are continually stimulating each other to inhibit reflexes to sensory input. It’s normal to not sneeze when you’re asleep, just as you don’t feel hungry, thirsty, or the need to go to the bathroom. However, you may sneeze if you are roused from NREM sleep by a very powerful stimulus.

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While you’re sleeping, your environment doesn’t change, so there’s less of a risk that anything harsh from outside will enter your nasal tube unexpectedly. It’s common to sneeze in NREM sleep when you’re sick, but you have to wake up to do it.