Sleep Cycles

Understanding sleep cycles may help you to sleep better. Sleep cycles are the progress from one stage of sleep to the next, throughout the night. Once you fall asleep, your body's internal clock helps it to move through each stage. The stages include more restorative levels of sleep and more alert stages of sleep. As you sleep longer, you transition into more of dream sleep.

There are five stages of sleep.

Sleep cycles are regulated by your internal clock, but they move through a specific pattern. The five stages of sleep are a series of movements in the cycle. Once you get through all five, you start all over again. When you initially go to sleep, you spend about an equal amount of time during each stage. Later, you will spend more time in the dream stage, called the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stage.

• Stage 1: The first part of the cycle is a drowsy phase. Here, your body starts to slow down in muscle movements and activity and your eyes move slower. In this stage of sleep, you wake up easily.
• Stage 2: The second stage in the cycle is a light sleep. Your body is still moving slowly and your heart rate is slowing. Your body's temperature also drops during this part of the cycle.
• Stages 3 and 4: The next two stages are simply a deepening of your sleep. It becomes harder to wake you and by the time you reach stage 4 of the sleep cycle, you are deeply sleeping. The amount of blood flowing to your brain has dropped. This is the most restorative level of sleep. Your brain is resting.
• Stage 5: In the final part of the cycle, the brain enters a dream phase, called REM. Here, your breathing quickens and your heart rate increases. You will enter the REM stage about ninety minutes after you have gone to sleep and you will have about three to five REM episodes each night.

Maintaining good sleep patterns is an important part of maintain sleep cycles. Your body needs to go through each stage of the cycle in order to get enough rest to do well in the activities you need your body to do. Those that suffer from a sleep disorder may in fact have trouble maintaining this sleep cycle, which leads to complications. If you do not cycle through sleep like this, but wake during the cycle, you could be putting your health in danger.

Heath deteriorates with poor sleep caused by a break in the regular cycle on a regular basis. If the brain is unable to enter restorative sleep for long enough periods, you may face problems including a drop in response time, inability to remember details, and the inability to perform tasks as you used to. Sleep disorders are quite common in individuals who are unable to maintain all the sleep cycles.

Maintaining regular, quality sleep cycles is important to your health. There are several things you can do to improve sleep cycles:

• Give yourself enough time to sleep each night. Doctors recommend between seven and nine hours of sleep per night. Less than six hours per night of sleep is not enough for your body to cycle naturally.
• Sleep at night, not during the day. Light is a stimulant to the brain and therefore it is harder to sleep well during the day. Your internal clock has a desire to sleep at night, so nighttime sleeping is more natural and easier.
• Get help for sleep disorders. If you are suffering from sleep disorders like sleep apnea or insomnia you should get help. These can keep you from being able to maintain sleep cycles, or can lead to complications of your health because you are not regularly maintaining a good sleep cycle.

Sleep cycles are an important part of maintaining your overall health. Your body needs this movement to help restore your brain's ability to function at top level. You may want to speak with a professional such as a sleep specialist to help you to get cycles back to normal.

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• Dream Research
• Stages of Sleep
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