Apprentice star reveals stress of the show gave her sleep paralysis

'I was stuck in my body and just stressed myself out'

The Apprentice is one of the most successful and longest running reality shows on television. For almost two decades, fans have watched all the business gaffs and boardroom drama as contestants battle it out to avoid being on the receiving end of Lord Alan Sugar's infamous finger.

Tonight (April 18), the winner of the show's 18th series will be crowned as the final is aired on BBC One.

Ahead of this, we spoke to the two most recent winners of the show, series 16 winner Harpreet Kaur and series 17 Marnie Swindells, to find out the secrets of The Apprentice.

You can watch the whole thing below.

Along with talking about what everyday life was like in the Apprentice house, what Lord Sugar is really like when the cameras aren't rolling, and whether the Loser's Cafe is really as grim as it looks, we also asked the pair about how intense the filming schedule was.

Kaur revealed she found filming "extremely intense," to the extent that she started suffering from sleep paralysis.

Recalling her time on the show, she said: "Any form of attention was completely new to me so I remember turning up on that first day going into the boardroom and, I don't know if you remember, but there's four cameras in that direction, four the other way and there's some behind you as well. I just turned to absolute jelly.

"I so badly wanted to win and do well, I put a lot of pressure on myself. So I couldn't sleep, I ended up experiencing sleep paralysis, which I had never had in my entire life."

Kaur explained how on one occasion she 'froze' in bed and was "trying to murmur" to her fellow Apprentice contestants in the room to help her.

She said: "I was stuck in my body and I just stressed myself out to that extent. I remember in the morning waking up and saying 'guys I was really trying to scream for help.'

"They were like 'oh we thought you were just sleep talking and murmuring along.'"

For Swindells, it was only after the Apprentice had finished that she started to struggle.

She said the hardest part for her was "leaving the process" and that she "fell into a bit of a pit of darkness."

She recalled: "I felt like I'd lost all sense of purpose. I was so productive [during the series] and we were creating these whole businesses in a day and off to Dubai and Antigua. This is going to sound so ungrateful but in many ways I feel like a failure, like I should have done things sooner.

You can watch the entire video below, or by visiting the JOE YouTube channel here.

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