10 Quick Facts About Sleep
Sleep plays a vital role in our emotional, mental and physical functioning. Here are some quick facts that you may or may not already know about our beloved Zzzz’s.
1. 90 Minutes cycles - Just like most things in life, we run on cycles. Our sleep cycle in particular, lasts approximately 90 minutes long and consists of Stages 1-4 and REM (rapid eye movement). Ideally during a full night’s sleep it is typical to have 5 cycles of sleep total.
2. The order of sleep stages - Oddly enough, the order goes as followed: 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1, REM.
3. First half of sleep is more physically restorative - During the first half of your night’s sleep you are getting more of Stages 3 & 4 (the stages responsible for your physical restoration). The second half of your night’s sleep comprises more of your REM sleep, which you may recall is our emotional and mental restorative sleep and when most of our dreaming occurs. This explains why you may notice that you remember your dreams that occur more in the early morning hours.
4. Everybody dreams - Yes. Even you. Most dreaming occurs in REM sleep as a result of our brains processing emotions and memories. If you’re not waking up in the middle of REM or close to that stage, you just may not remember them.
5. Morning sleepiness is normal - This is called Sleep Inertia; the sense of feeling tired or groggy when you first get up in the morning. It does not necessary mean you didn’t have restful sleep, this is just the temporary inertia from your night’s sleep passing. To help speed up this process, expose your eyes to sunlight and get moving!
6. Menopause can cause insomnia - A few reasons during the stages of peri-menopause and menopause: 1) night sweats and hot flashes aside from feeling physically uncomfortable from them, can create an adrenaline surge and core body temperature increases which physically stimulates the person even more and 2) the sleep promoting hormones estrogen and progesterone are decreasing during this time of a woman’s life.
7. Reduce evening light exposure - Exposing your eyes to light at night has more effect on you than you realize. The light entering into the eye goes into the pineal glad which stops releasing melatonin and disrupts the sleep process. It’s particularly the blue light and white lights that are most detrimental (which happen to be the same shade of lights in our electronic devices). For some people, sensitivity to light can take up to 2 hours to be able to fall back asleep.
8. Awakenings at night are normal - Waking up the middle of the night is absolutely normal, even healthy, because it often signifies that we have just completed a full 90-minute sleep cycle. In fact most of us aren’t really aware this happening because it’s so subtle. Some people (more prone to sleep anxiety performance) are just more aware of this wake state than others. So instead of becoming anxious when finding yourself awake, roll yourself over and tell yourself you’re about to start another sleep cycle.
9. That Sensation of Falling - You know what I’m talking about, right? It’s when you startle yourself awake as a result of feeling like you’re falling. This is called a “hypnic jerk”. It usually occurs during the first stage of sleep when your brain recognizes that your body is too tense so it forces your whole body to relax by automatically “jerking” or tensing and quickly releasing into a more restful state.
10. Sleep Aid Black Box Warning - We all know sleep meds have adverse side effects and are no longer the preferred treatment for insomnia. However, Medscape Psychiatry recently published an article citing that in April 2019, the FDA took it further and added black-box warnings to these medications. The reason? Due to “disorder of confusional arousal” (i.e. sleep walking, sleep driving, sleep eating, other abnormal behavior), there have been more reports of serious injury and even death. More reason to give Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBTi) a try!