People who don’t sleep enough also have a higher risk of developing high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and kidney disease. A lack of sleep can affect your mental health, making it harder to think or focus, putting you in a worse mood, and leading to bigger problems like anxiety or depression. When you don’t get enough sleep, it can take a big toll. Releasing hormones necessary for growth and fertility.2 Why Are Sleep Cycles Important?Īltogether, the different stages of sleep lead to many important effects within the mind and body, including: 4 Your brain also becomes much more active, leading to vivid dreams. Most of your muscles are completely relaxed, but your eye muscles rapidly contract, making your eyes move in multiple directions. The brain becomes very active during the REM sleep stage. 2 REM sleep stages build on themselves and get longer each cycle. These stages are followed by rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is the sleep stage during which you have dreams. It becomes more difficult for external disturbances to awaken you when you are in stage 3 sleep. During this time, your heart rate and breathing become very slow, and your body heals. Stage 3 sleep is deep sleep that provides quality rest for your mind and body. Your brain activity diminishes, but occasionally has quick spurts of activity called sleep spindles, which help refresh your brain and process new memories. 2 Stage 2Īs your body further relaxes and slows, you enter stage 2 of the sleep cycle. Your muscles become more relaxed, but they may wake you if they suddenly jerk or twitch. During this stage, your breaths and heartbeat start to slow. ![]() When you fall asleep, your brain slips into the first stage of sleep, which lasts just a few minutes. You sleep the most deeply during the last stages of NREM sleep (Stage 3). Your sleep progresses from light to deep sleep and then back up again. The first three sleep stages are non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. NREM sleep dominates the first half of the night and REM dominates the second half of the night. ![]() Suffice it to say that there are currently three stages in NREM sleep and one stage in REM sleep. Two of the NREM stages (Stages 3 and 4) were combined into one stage and thus, the numbering is different depending on when the information was published. The conversation around sleep cycles is complicated by the fact that the numbering of stages has changed in the past few years. Each night, you complete about four to six sleep cycles, which on average takes about 8 hours. This cycle can range from 70 to 90 minutes. One sleep cycle occurs when you progress through all of the sleep stages. As you leave one stage and enter the next, you experience changes in brain activity as well as body processes like breathing and heart rate. Your body moves through four sleep stages each night. The best restorative rest is a complex dance of different sleep stages that shift and expand throughout the night. When it comes to getting a good night’s rest, it’s not enough to focus on quantity - it’s also important to consider your sleep quality.
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