Sleep: Everything You Ever Didn’t Want to Know
Who loves their sleep?! This girl does. Truth be told when Drake speaks of only loving his bed and his mom. Let’s love sleep even more by first appreciating what sleep looks like and the purpose of it.
Sleep has stages and goes in cycles, each cycle of sleep lasting approximately 90 minutes. So ideally, this would mean that the average person encounters about five sleep cycles per night (assuming one is receiving 8 hours of sleep).
Stage 1 – This is categorized as very “light” sleep. The way I describe this to my patients is the situation in which you are on the couch with your partner watching a movie and all of a sudden you receive an elbow nudge proceeding with, “hey you’re snoring and we’re trying to watch this movie together!” and you proclaim, “what are you talking about, I was awake the whole time!”. This is Stage 1 sleep. We often don’t even realize we are asleep and are easily awoken during this stage. The other noteworthy characteristic of Stage 1 is when we experience what is called the hypnic jerk – the sensation that you are falling and suddenly jerk or shout. Yep. This is a thing and is completely normal. It’s essentially your brain sensing that your body is too physically tense to allow itself to fall into deeper stages of sleep, so the brain attempts to relax the body by causing an abrupt and quick full body tensing and then a release. This is similar to the notion of when you flex a muscle and release it, that release of the muscle actually causes it to relax even more than it was prior to the flex. You may find that you are having more of these hypnic jerks if you are a bit more stressed in your life. More life stress, more tension you are carrying in your body.
Stage 2 – This stage isn’t as exciting, but, nonetheless important as it is responsible for preparing your physiology to advance into later deep stages of sleep. Essentially your heart race slows down and core body temperature decreases. If these physiological changes do not occur, you won’t be able to go into deeper stages of sleep which will serve quite problematic.
Stage 3 and Stage 4 – These stages are combined because of how similar they are in nature – the deepest stages of sleep and are responsible for the physical restoration of your body. Your body is healing itself; fighting illness and inflammation, healing injuries, muscle and tissue repair, strengthening your immune system, and rebooting your energy for the next day. You are also very “out of it” in these stages of sleep because of how deep in sleep you are. In fact, if you’ve ever experienced waking up and feeling disoriented to what day or time it is or even to where you are, this is an indication of waking up in the middle of stage 3 or 4 sleep. Also, there’s this process I like to call “brain scrubbing” that occurs in these stages. This mechanism is responsible for removing (“scrubbing”) waste, toxins, etc. out of your brain and cerebral spinal fluid. This is being found to be extremely important because too much waste and toxins in the brain can increase inflammation and thus your risk for developing Dementia later on.
REM – Rapid Eye Movement, characterized by your brain and physiology paradoxically being quite active in this stage of sleep – your eyes are moving quickly back and forth, heart rate, blood pressure and breathing increase. Your brain is extremely active during this time as it is processing and consolidating emotions and memories from earlier that day. Any guess when you dream then? You guessed it – most of our dreams and nightmares occur during REM sleep which makes sense because dreams are best understood as being the product of your brain processing memories and emotions. Your body is also in semi-paralysis, conveniently, so that you don’t act out any of those dreams. Everybody dreams. Yes, even you. I promise. You just don’t remember dreaming. If you DO remember your dreams, it is likely because you woke up either in the middle of REM dreaming or close to it.
Feeling physically worn down or even achy? Not receiving enough Stage 3 & 4 sleep will cause you to feel like shit physically, to so clinically put it. If you’re an athlete or have a very active lifestyle these stages are extremely relevant for your recovery. Individuals living with chronic pain will notice more flair ups without adequate Stage 3 & 4.
Feeling a bit all over the place emotionally, feeling more anxious/depressed or less tolerant of your emotions? Forgetting where you put your sunglasses that are currently on your head and cant pay attention? No, you’re not developing early onset Dementia. Likely culprit is not enough REM sleep thus inadequate emotional and mental restoration.
In wrapping things up, sleep is no doubt extremely important for our physical and mental health. I’ll go more into the effects of chronic disrupted sleep in a later blog. But, for now, if you’re experiencing a few bad nights here and there, take this article to heart knowing that a lot of restoration is happening in just 90 minutes, so don’t lose sleep over it!