Sleep And Dreams
Sleep is something we all need, and not getting enough good quality sleep can significantly impact us physically, mentally and emotionally.
The reason is that while we are asleep, our bodies are anything but resting. Overnight is when the body repairs itself the most, and the brain does an awful lot of housekeeping too, processing the events and experiences of the day and filing away what we need to keep from those while discarding unnecessary stuff.
Most people go through 4-6 sleep cycles a night, and each cycle is made up of four stages:
Stage 1 - falling asleep/very light sleep, when it is easy to get woken up. These stages are very short, especially later in the night.
Stage 2 - Light sleep, also referred to as core sleep, when temperature drops and heart rate and breathing slow down. These stages usually get longer as the night wears on.
Stage 3 - Deep sleep, when growth hormone is released, and the body does most of the repair work. Brain activity is reduced, and it is hard to wake someone in this stage of sleep. Most deep sleep occurs in the early part of the night.
Stage 4 - REM sleep (rapid eye movement) is when the brain activity picks up almost to waking levels, and the most vivid dreams occur. This is when the day's events are processed, so our dreams can sometimes be a confused mishmash of several things that happened during the day. REM sleep won’t usually start until a person has been asleep for about 90 minutes, and the length of the REM stages increases as the night wears on.
I am a lark and go to bed early and wake early. I track my sleep and I have only small amounts of deep sleep but loads of REM, which is probably why I often have eureka moments about problems I am working on at silly o’clock.
But we need sufficient amounts and quality of sleep to be at our best in every way. And there are some tried and tested tips to try to maximise both of those.
So, how is your sleep pattern? Do you track your sleep?
Do you wake refreshed or feel like you haven’t hardly slept at all?
Do you have any sleep tips to share?
Let’s have some fun today with all aspects of sleep and dreaming, whether that is music, videos, gifs or memes!
