Penis fell asleep

Sometimes I will wake up in the middle of the night and realize I have been sleeping on my arm and it has totally fallen asleep. 100% numb meat - can’t feel a thing, can’t move it - down the entire length of my arm. Its quite an interesting experience to have a totally numb limb and to throw it around like a big noodle. So, my question is this: why don’t my arm cells die? I really have no idea how long my arm is in this state before I wake up but I am a very heavy sleeper. Perhaps some signal gets sent to my brain that wakes me up immediately? I just wanna know why my arm hasn’t turned black and fallen off. I wonder this because people are always talking about how dangerous it is to lose circulation in your penis.

Recently my dick fell asleep during a long hanging session and it freaked me out (because it was numb). The feeling came back after a few minutes. I hate to experiment to find out if it would turn black and fall off if I went into a deep sleep hanging and didn’t monitor my penis.

I always get my limbs falling asleep, once in a week, in evrey single day of the weeks my limbs fell asleep(legs, arms, you name it).

Now, although you might sleep “alot”, and let’s say your arm have been cuted off blood circulation 30 mins after you have fallen asleep (though it should be much more) it’s still not enough to cause serious tissue and cells damage.

I guess it can hurt large groups of tissue, but still no serious enough damage.

That’s my opinion, im not a doctor or anything.

Actually, you are not constricting blood flow when an arm or foot falls ‘asleep’. What you have done is put a compressional force on a nerve, and that is what causes the extremity to sleep. Depending on which big bundle of nerves you have compressed is the cause of whatever going to sleep. There is a large bundle of nerves that run along the arm pit (brachial plexus) and if you compress part of that, your arm goes nitey nite. In the lower back and upper butt, there are two large bundles of nerves (lumbar and sacral plexus), now some of those nerves run along your backside and due to sitting in the wrong position will compress them causing the leg to sleep. If it is a foot, then you have compressed the nerve that runs right behind your knee (sciatic—splitting off into the peroneals), henceforth your foot takes a nap. If in fact you were to cut off blood circulation, your extremity would become cold, and rather nasty looking (depending on how long the blood flow was constricted).

Once the compressional force is removed from the nerve, be it waking up or moving about, you get the ever popular pins and needles effect and that is caused from the nerve impulses returning to their normal and usual state of receiving and sending messages to the brain.

Gee, I hope this was in English and not medicalese.

Sunshine, very nice explanation! I would believe you were a med student.

I agree with the sunshinekid! The asleep member is not asleep due to lack of blood flow, but due to interupted nerve signals. That is the proper medical explanation.

Here comes the Sun, da, da, da, da, da and I feel, alright yeah!

Neat, I didn’t know that, but it makes total sense now that I think about it. My arm was never cold, just floppy and senseless.

Excellent info Sunshine.

Has anyone experienced this “pins and needles” effect in their unit whilst PE’ing? Based on the above explanation of its cause, I should think it a definite warning sign that one is doing something wrong.

Ophiosaurus, any such sensation after removing the hanging device?

So how long before cells die after blood flow is halted? And what exactly is it that causes them to stop functioning (die)? I think brain cells can go 2 minutes or so right?

Only that one time. I am more careful now. I am hanging now so I may have another report.

My penis has never fallen asleep; however, I’ve had all of my limbs to fall asleep on several occasions (not at the same time, though I’ll have the occasional arm and leg being asleep at the same time). It’s a huge pain in the ass, but it makes for a good laugh when I try to visualize the way I must looked throwing a limp arm all over the alarm clock in an attempt to turn the damn thing off.

Watching me fall on the floor because I tried to stand on a leg that didn’t work probably looks a little funny too.

I often wake up with BOTH my arms totally numb (sometimes just one though as well) - and it does my nut right in!! It’s impossible to move the arms or the rest of me so I always end up having to wake my gal up so she can flip me over!!

Not cool!

sunshine’s explanation is right on.

To prevent asleep arms, take an extra pillow to bed. Sleep with it against your chest, the usually dead arm across the pillow, sort of embracing it. This relieves the pressure against the nerves at shoulder level. You’ll wake to Dead-arm Syndrome much less frequently.