Understanding Sleep Cycles
8:00 AM
Each night, when you sleep, you go through several sleep cycles, each lasting about 90 minutes on average. During that 90 minute period, your body goes through five sleep stages, in varying lengths, which can be divided into two categories:
- NREM (Non-Rapid Eye Movement) sleep consists of the first 4/5 stages of sleep. During the course of NREM sleep, your muscle movement, breathing and heart rate slow, your temperature lowers in an effort to bring you into a resting state where you can settle into a deep sleep. Stage three and four are where you will find deep sleep, where the brain produces delta waves, the muscles experience very little activity, and your body develops a slow, deep rhythmic breathing pattern. If you've ever been woken up and felt very confused about where you are or what day it is, chances are you were pulled out of stage three or four in your sleep cycle.
- REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep is when you dream. Your body continues its involuntary life-sustaining processes, but otherwise, your muscles go into shut down mode and remain paralyzed in this stage.
Understanding sleep can get really complicated, really fast. Although each sleep cycle lasts about the same amount of time, the composition of each cycle can vary greatly during the course of the night. In the beginning of the night, you're likely to experience your deepest sleep, spending the majority of your time in stages 3-4, while during the remainder of the night, you're likely to spend increasing intervals of REM sleep.
Those that wake in their lightest stages of sleep experience more energy and a higher level of focus throughout the day. So how do you ensure that you wake up at the right time? One tool that I've found to be helpful is the Sleep Cycle app, which is available for free across platforms. The app uses the sounds you make if you're an Apple user, or your accelerometer if you're an Android user, to make guesses about which stage of sleep you are in. Not only can you then review your sleep quality each morning, you can also use the app's alarm clock function to give it a window of time to wake you up. Within that window, the app will determine when you're in your lightest level of sleep and gently wake you at the best time. To understand more about how the app works and how to use it properly, you can find more details on their website.
If you've been checking in your cycles and you know that your body is experiencing interrupted or light sleep, be sure to check out this post, which hits on some tips for improving your quality of sleep.
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