10 Cool (And Crazy) Things Your Body Is Doing While You’re Asleep

3. Your Muscles Are Paralysed

This sounds scary, but temporary muscle paralysis is actually totally necessary thing for your body to go through while you’re asleep. If your muscles weren’t paralysed, there’d be nothing to stop you acting out your dreams while you’re asleep, a pretty dangerous activity. There are often new stories about the difficulties that sleepwalkers get into while they’re on nighttime wanders, so believe us when we tell you this kind of paralysis is a good thing.

4. You Get Taller

Ever felt like gaining a centimetre or two, vertically that is? Well, perhaps getting a good night’s sleep is the way to do it. While you certainly don’t wake up feeling like a Scandinavian model, your body does get taller when you sleep. The reason for this is that the discs in your spine, the ones that act as cushions between the bone, rehydrate and grow in size overnight as the weight of your body isn’t pressing on them. When you’re standing, those discs quickly shrink again, so if you want to make sure they’re rehydrating, a good sleep on a firm mattress in the metal position will do it.

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