My fiancée has learned the signs of my sleep paralysis episodes. She’ll notice my body I’m twitching and it’ll wake her up. Sometimes I can even manage to get some grunts out.

Originally she would wake up and kind of gently comfort me, and try to wake me up. Lately, she doesn’t even wake up and she just kinda turns in her sleep and whacks me in the face like she’s hitting the snooze button. It’s… admittedly been very effective.

CPAP

You likely have sleep apena, and when your blood oxygen drops low you get sleep paralysis.

This sounds medical, better to ask an MD about the syndrome.

I get sleepy paralysis what works for me is attempting to activate a large set of muscles repeatedly with great force. Like trying to kick my legs up and down really fast. My theory is that this process starts to signal to my brain that it’s not time for sleepy chemicals anymore and each attempted movements brings be closer to being awake

Get examined. Narcolepsy is a terrible thing. My friend couldn’t work late as she’d be prone to hallucination while driving. She’s better now with a good drug regimen and awareness but she reports being very frightened for a while.

It’s my understanding that everyone has sleep paralysis - the brain “switches off” the body (apart from essentials: breathing, heart beat etc) so you don’t come to grief acting out your dreams. What we call sleep paralysis is when you wake, but your body hasn’t been switched back on.

I used to have horrible sleep paralysis nightmares quite often. But then I read about what it really is, and I stopped having them. It was like my brain realised it was out of sync and corrected itself.

Try to take deep breaths. If it’s low blood oxygen as others say, that could help.

Alternative if your brain/body won’t allow it: Try holding your breath. You might have control over that. The aim is to hold long enough trigger a gasp reflex which will, hopefully, shake you awake.

The hard part is finding the presence of mind to remember things to try when you’re in an altered state of consciousness.

I know it’s not exactly what you’re after, but have you tried holding your breath or a few rounds of trying to breathe sharply?

YMMV but I find I can break out pretty easily.

First of all, get a sleep study done. Sleep paralysis can be a sign of underlying sleeping disorders such as apnea, which is incredibly unhealthy if untreated.

If you study checks out clean and you’re still looking for a way to manipulate something with your fingers then the only thing I can think of that you’d be able to DIY is some kind of Arduino-type button thingamajig that you could strap to a finger that sends a wireless signal to some kind of alarm in the room.

A D1 mini is small, cheap, and easy to configure. If you have no idea what I’m talking about you’ll need to do some homework and learn some stuff, but as far as projects go it’s pretty simple to set up. Hardest part would likely be rigging something that you could use that doesn’t get triggered inadvertently. Cockpit style toggle switch with a cover, maybe? Lol.

Chiming in with my own sleep paralysis tip – I can usually control my breath enough that I force myself to snore, which is usually loud enough to wake me up

I used to get sleep paralysis all the time. For me it was because I was sleeping on my back which (according to some shit I read online a very long time ago) makes sleep paralysis more likely to occur. Haven’t had any issues since I started forcing myself to sleep on my side only.

You can try looking into a sleep position trainer. It isn’t what you’re asking about, but it has had good results in reducing or eliminating the paralysis episodes, so it’s a similar outcome.

The problem with what you’re specifically asking about is that nobody has gone into production afaik. There’s patents for things like they, but they’re either junk (and obviously so), or would be way too complicated to set up and use reliably. Sleep paralysis isn’t usually responsive to just shaking by itself.

But you could try something similar to the alarms made for deaf people, if you have a consistent timing with your episodes. Or do something like strap a massager to your hand where you can cut it on and hope that the vibration breaks through. People have made that work, though it isn’t consistent afaik.

Do you sleep on your back? AFAIK sleep paralysis is more common for back sleepers.

In my experience, I’m awake, I’m conscious, I just can’t move.

But if I logically think “this is sleep paralysis, that’s pretty dope” the feeling of looming malevolence fades eventually and I’m able to move again.

If a person or device shakes you awake, do you more quickly regain the ability to move?

Not that I know of. When I had sleep paralysis every night it was because I was sleeping on my back under a heated blanket on a futon. Changing that reduced the sleep paralysis. Finding your personal triggers is helpful. I mostly get it these days if I’m abruptly woken up and then fall immediately back to sleep. Try messing with how you’re sleeping, or look up suggestions on how to break out of it? On the rare occasion I still get it, I know how to break out because of that unfortunate period of time when I got to experiment every night.

I wonder if an alarm like you’re suggesting would just make regular alarm noises. That’d probably work. The one time an episode itself made me break out of it, I thought I heard my mother screaming in the kitchen, in a way that made me think she’d chopped off a finger. I immediately leapt out of bed and ran there, like, “are you okay???” thinking she’d be bleeding out. She looked at me and asked the same question, since she’d been minding her own business and suddenly i yelled and ran in. Alarm that makes a blood curdling scream, anyone?