When you wake up and notice your pillow is damp, the first thing that usually comes to mind is a feeling of embarrassment or discomfort. However, drooling while sleeping is much more common than we think. It’s not a sign of carelessness or poor hygiene, but rather a reflection of what’s happening inside our body, and more specifically, our brain, while we rest.
Although it may seem trivial, this phenomenon reveals fascinating details about how our bodily functions work while we sleep and how our body maintains balance without us even realizing it.
Nighttime drooling, medically known as nocturnal sialorrhea, occurs when saliva production exceeds the mouth’s capacity to contain it. During the day, we swallow constantly, and our brain carefully regulates the amount of saliva we produce.
At night, however, this dynamic changes. The muscles of the mouth and face relax deeply during sleep, and this relaxation makes it easier for saliva to escape without us having any control over it. Furthermore, our sleeping position has a major impact. Sleeping on your stomach, for example, causes gravity to favor saliva flow, while sleeping on your side can also favor it depending on the tilt of your head.
The brain doesn’t stop while we sleep; in fact, it’s very active, alternating between different sleep phases: REM and non-REM.
During REM sleep, which is the phase in which most vivid dreams occur, the body’s muscles relax even more, and although saliva production may decrease, the risk of saliva leakage increases due to the extreme relaxation of the mouth muscles. This combination makes drooling during this phase quite common and often unavoidable. The brain, although aware of internal saliva signals, cannot intervene during deep sleep, so saliva leakage occurs silently.
There are physical and health factors that can cause some people to drool more than others. Nasal congestion is a classic example: when we have difficulty breathing through the nose, the body tends to breathe through the mouth, and this causes saliva to leak more easily. Similarly, certain medications and medical conditions that affect saliva production, swallowing, or muscle coordination can also increase the likelihood of drooling.Buy vitamins and supplements
For Complete Cooking STEPS Please Head On Over To Next Page Or Open button (>) and don’t forget to SHARE with your Facebook friends.
