There are some moments in where you really don't want to fall asleep. Take driving for example, it's not a good idea to fall asleep at the wheel, is it? Or while watching Fight Club, you really, really don't want to fall asleep during Fight Club (imagine missing the twist?). Another incident where you don't want to fall asleep is during sex. Lets face it, if you're getting down and dirty with someone and they drift off into a deep slumber, you're going to feel pretty insecure about your performance. However, sadly for one woman, this is exactly what happens every time she orgasms. A young mom from Nottingham, UK, "falls asleep" every time that she has an orgasm due to a rare neurological disorder. Jessica Southall, 20, is a mother of one who suffers from narcolepsy with cataplexy. Jessica's condition means that whenever she experiences a strong emotion or sensation her muscles react, causing her to look like she has fallen asleep. According to Jessica, the "sleep attacks" have happened when she was in labour, hears a joke or gets really upset. However, more embarrassingly for her, she also claims that the reaction often happens when she orgasms, and says that it made for an interesting conversation with her partner, Junior Santiago, when they first started dating. "I just had to explain to [Junior] that it’s only going to happen when he makes me feel at my very best," she said. "But it’s not ideal." Jessica says that she experienced her first episode of cataplexy when she was just 16-years-old and claims that she now has to sleep for up to 13 hours a day due to chronic tiredness. According to the young mother, she is left feeling exhausted by the condition, which is caused by the brain being unable to regulate sleeping and waking patterns normally. While the orgasm side of things has made people laugh, the condition also has some less amusing side effects, with vivid nightmares and hallucinations also being part of the condition. However, Jessica says that while she may look like she is asleep during the attacks, she is actually "fully awake". "One minute I'll be there in stitches laughing my head off, not able to stop and the next moment my head is on my chest or I'm lying on the floor." "I can’t respond or snap out of it until the emotion stops. To any other person it looks like I’ve fallen asleep." "It might sound funny - and I do have to try and be light-hearted about it - but it's horrible really." Her family initially thought it was down to stress and a change of routine after the summer holidays, but Jessica was worried as soon as it began to happen. Jessica says that the attacks used to be a lot worse, claiming that initially she would collapse everytime she laughed. "I was falling asleep on the bus on the way to school, in my lessons, on the way home, as soon as I'd had my dinner - and sometimes in the middle of my dinner," she said. "At the weekend I wasn't waking up until 3pm and then I'd go downstairs and fall asleep on the sofa. "I think people thought I was being lazy, but I knew it wasn't right." "At my worst I was collapsing every time I laughed," Jessica said. After months of tests, Jessica was finally diagnosed with narcolepsy and cataplexy and she says that she is now beginning to take back control of her body.  

A 14-year-old girl reportedly slept for 32 years and woke up as a 46-year-old woman.

Have you ever experienced waking up after a slumber, feeling as though you’ve slept for decades? This feeling is quite common, even if you’ve only napped for a couple of hours.

However, for Karolina Olsson, the situation was very different as the young girl from the small island of Oknö near Mönsterås, Sweden, allegedly snoozed for over three decades...

She has now earned the nickname of a real-life "sleeping beauty" due to the shocking stories circulating about her.

Born on October 29, 1861, Olsson was the only girl in her family and the second-eldest of six children.

She grew up normal for the first 14 years of her life, but things took a turn in 1876 when she returned home from school with her brothers and complained of an excruciating toothache and a feeling of general unease.

According to reports, the teen's family suspected that she might be influenced by witchcraft or under some sort of evil spirit, however, it is also believed that the young girl informed them that she had slipped on ice while crossing a frozen river.

Nevertheless, Olsson's concerned mom instructed her to go to bed and she did with no complaints.

But, little did the family know that the girl would not wake up for 32 years.

Olsson earned the nickname of a real-life "sleeping beauty" due to the stories about her. Credit: Heritage Images / Getty

At first, Olsson's worried family and neighbors collected money to have a doctor examine Olsson. However, when all attempts to wake her reportedly failed, they decided to conduct regular checkups to monitor her condition.

Over time, the girl's condition is believed to have remained unaltered, despite attempts to awaken her including subjecting her to electric currents in the hospital. Medical experts from a range of fields were apparently stumped by her situation, as it defied the usual understanding of sleeping disorders.

Reports state that the girl's mother continued to care for her through the years by feeding her milk. And, this continued even when the matriarch passed away in 1905, and a housekeeper was hired to help look after Olsson.

Three years later, the housekeeper heard peculiar sounds coming from the girl's room and rushed upstairs. To her shock, she found the now 46-year-old woman crying and staggering around her room.

Astonishingly, she had no recollection of the 32 years she had spent asleep, and could not recognize her brothers.

Credit: Alvarez / Getty

Several doctors examined Olsson and learned that apart from some weight loss and her younger behavior, the now-46-year-old was unaffected by the many years she had spent sleeping.

While Olsson ended up regaining her strength and speech in a matter of weeks, it left some people to wonder whether she really had been sleeping, or whether there was another reason for the bizarre ordeal.

It has been speculated that Swedish psychiatrist Harald Fröderström believed that the woman suffered from some sort of psychosis brought on or triggered by a traumatic event.

This may have led her to withdraw from the world by going under her blankets as a way of protecting herself. However, this is all unconfirmed as to this day, Olsson's story remains one surrounded by mystery.

Reportedly, after her awakening, the woman went on to live for another 42 years before she passed away in 1950 aged 88.

Featured image credit: Alvarez / Getty

If you could take a pill that would eliminate the need for sleep, would you take it? Imagine never feeling tired ever again. Imagine nights out that never have to end and the vast amount of free time that you'll have to enjoy. Since we spend, on average, a third of our lives asleep, this pill would basically give us 33 per cent of our life expectancy back. But I just don't buy it. I can't explain why, but something about the concept just rubs me up the wrong way. Maybe that's because, for me, sleep isn't a chore or an inconvenience - something distracting me from better things. It's a pleasure, a great pleasure, to be able to switch off and rest, either by ourselves or snuggled up next to someone special. Sleep is the death of each day, a time in which we are able to take stock of events and process our experiences. And of course, without sleep, how could we dream? For these reasons, I think I would refuse the pill, and continue my nightly forays into the land of nod. Furthermore, new research seems to prove that I was right all along. In fact, missing out on a full eight hours could incur some pretty serious health risks later on down the line. Researchers from Binghamton University have discovered that people who regularly miss out on eight hours of sleep are actually more likely to suffer from a range of mental health problems associated with intrusive thoughts, depression, anxiety and other destabilising mood disorders. Together, professor Meredith Coles and former graduate student Jacob Nota asked 52 people who reported that they were persistently plagued by worrying, anxiety-inducing thoughts about how much sleep they managed to get on average. The participants were then shown a number of different images, designed to trigger a variety of emotional responses, including elation, shock, fear and sadness. Cole and Nota recorded them, and then carefully noted their eye movements while the participants reacted to the pictures. The two researchers found out that the people who slept less overall, or whose sleep pattern was often interrupted, found it more difficult to shift their attention away from the negative images. The paper's abstract noted that "Shorter habitual sleep duration was associated with more time looking at emotionally negative compared to neutral images during a free-viewing attention task and more difficulty disengaging attention from negative compared to neutral images during a directed attention task. In addition, longer sleep onset latencies were also associated with difficulty disengaging attention from negative stimuli. The relations between sleep and attention for positive images were not statistically significant." Their findings were published in the journal of the The National Centre for Biotechnology Information.Meredith Coles herself commented: "We found that people in this study have some tendencies to have thoughts get stuck in their heads, and their elevated negative thinking makes it difficult for them to disengage with the negative stimuli that we exposed them to. While other people may be able to receive negative information and move on, the participants had trouble ignoring it." She added: "These negative thoughts are believed to leave people vulnerable to different types of psychological disorders, such as anxiety or depression ... We realised over time that this might be important - this repetitive negative thinking is relevant to several different disorders like anxiety, depression and many other things.This is novel in that we're exploring the overlap between sleep disruptions and the way they affect these basic processes that help in ignoring those obsessive negative thoughts." But depression and anxiety aren't the only health dangers that bedbugs will avoid. Previous scientific studies have also shown a correlation between lack of sleep and a weakened immune system, high fat and cholesterol, a loss of sex drive, mood swings, high blood pressure, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and even certain forms of dementia, such as Alzheimer's disease, later on in life. More worrying still is the fact that fewer and fewer people are getting the requisite eight hours of slumber. According to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, a third of Americans get less than seven hours of sleep a night, and anywhere between 50 million to 70 million people suffer from sleep disorders, including sleep apnea and insomnia. So next time someone accuses you of being lazy, just fluff your pillows, hit the snooze button and keep your eyes shut. After all, it's for your own good. 

A woman who experiences spontaneous org*sms between 3 to 25 times a day has taken to social media to answer the one question people always ask her.Taking to Reddit, a user only defined by her online persona as @Teddybearsammy24 opened up about a very unique condition that she suffers from called persistent genital arousal disorder (PGAD).According to the Cleveland Clinic, PGAD is a rare condition that involves experiencing unwanted sensations of arousal in your genitals that don't resolve with one or more org*sms.The medical center noted that if this is left untreated, it can take a toll on your body and mental health and reduce your quality of life.Credit: Maria Korneeva/GettyWith it being such a rare disease, lots of social media users had questions for the poster, after she took to the platform writing: "I am 29(f) [and] my goal is to educate. The presentation of my illness causes spontaneous org*sms but that is not true for most people who have my condition.She continued: "Most people who have my condition experience burning, itching, intense pain, UTI-[related] symptoms and or unwanted arousal which is not alleviated with org*sms."The key thing to [note] is that this is unwanted," she added.One user took to the comments to ask: "Has this messed up any relationships you have had?""I’ve only ever told one partner because I’ve only ever had one partner and they are extremely understanding," the person responded.Another wondered: "When did you develop this condition? What was the diagnosis process like?"The user replied by stating they initially thought it was a trauma response from being "assaulted" when she was only nine years old. However, other symptoms led her to believe that it could be something else so after being referred to a specialist, she was finally able to get a more detailed diagnosis."Usually a person would be diagnosed by a genital pelvic specialist or a urologist.i told people about my experiences and have done enough research to figure out what I had because of my presentation," she wrote.Credit: SDI Productions/GettyA third Reddit-user stated: "What's something you wish the world would understand about your condition.""It’s not something you want to have it can be very distressing," she wrote in a lengthy response. "It’s pleasurable in the way that tickling is pleasurable but you wouldn’t want someone to tickle you all the time because I have trauma sometimes I feel like I’m getting assaulted all over again."Also I missed my mother's funeral because of this," she continued. "Someone here asked me if I can be around children and that’s probably the worst thing I’m afraid someone would ask me because they might interpret my illness as something much more insidious."But by far the question that seemed to be asked repeatedly always revolved around whether the org*sms felt good or not."It’s pleasurable at first but then there’s this fear that it’s always going to not stop," the anonymous user responded.If you think you or someone you may know may be suffering with this or any related illnesses, it's best to seek professional help.Featured Image Credit: Eleganza/Getty

Try as we might, we can't help but make excuses for piling on the pounds. I'm certainly guilty of it. Any excuse for me to binge on junk food and lie vegetating on the couch is good enough for me. I've attributed my own pot belly to various different causes, such as a bad winter, a glorious summer, a vacation, and overwork. But 34-year-old Misé Coakley might just have the best excuse of all time: she ended up gaining a shocking eight stone because she was sleeping too much, sometimes snoozing for up to 22 hours a day.

Misé's habitual sleepiness wasn't down to laziness on her part however, but was in fact a bad case of narcolepsy which had been exacerbated by her numerous preexisting health concerns, such as meningitis, measles and glandular fever. She was so consistently exhausted that her family had to carry her from her bed to the sofa, and she quickly ballooned from a slim size 10 to a massive 24. It wasn't until a family trip to America, when she was alarmed by photographs of herself and her chafing legs, that she finally decided to get serious about her weight loss, and thus joined Slimming World.

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Commenting on her sudden, and bizarre, weight gain, Misé stated: "I hadn’t been scoffing thousands of calories a day. I’d just been unconscious for so much of the time – unable to hardly move without falling asleep with exhaustion and eating unhealthy snacks when I could, that the weight had piled on as I slept ... I was busy all the time, working like crazy and not dealing with my grief,” she said. A friend offered me some work as a deckhand offshore and I took it, again grafting all the hours under the sun."

She added: "I’d sleep most of the day, for 22 hours sometimes. I just couldn’t get enough sleep. I would crawl around at home, as I wouldn’t even have the energy to walk. I couldn’t stay awake long enough to eat any proper, balanced meals. I was just eating small things, or snacking and then sleeping – burning none of the calories I’d consumed ... I didn’t have the energy to cook anything properly, and if I did try,  I would have to stop and have several breaks even when eating the simplest of meals, like soup or cereal. If I tried to lean forward to pick up a snack or a drink, even that would tire me out so much I’d need to sleep."

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Thankfully, Misé's story has a happy ending, and she was able to shed the weight and return to her original size. She now works full-time as a Slimming World consultant. So next time you decide to skip the gym session, don't blame it on your alarm clock. Instead, just admit that you've been taking it easy instead of working out.