What Makes Your Foot Go to Sleep?
What Makes Your Foot Go to Sleep? When you sit with your leg doubled up, you are squeezing the blood vessels in your leg so that the blood can barely pass through them. When this happens, your blood can’t carry the poisonous wastes out of your cells. These wastes accumulate and block the nerve cells from carrying sensory messages from your foot to your brain.
Your foot becomes numb; we say it has “gone to sleep.” When you stand up, blood flows regularly again and the nerves in your foot begin to send lots of messages to your brain. You feel the nerve activity as “pins and needles” prickling your foot.
Worried about your sleepy feet? You don’t need to be — everyone has a foot fall asleep once in a while, and it’s rare for it to mean there is something wrong in your body. If you want to keep your feet awake and kicking, don’t sit on them or put them in other positions where you’re squashing the nerves.