Learn More About Stages of Sleep

If sleep does not come simple for you recognizing how you sleep or knowing the mechanism behind what produces a healthy night’s slumber could help you figure out the issue of what is keeping you conscious. Sleep is not as readily fathomable as you think because you are either conscious, asleep, or someplace in between. Your body engages in several processes once your head hits the pillow and you close your eyes that contributes to how soundly or how softly you will sleep.

Drowsiness is the first stage of sleeping and at this time your muscles will go limp, you will feel yourself get weary, and your eyes will drift closed on their own. This is the fastest developing phase, usually between five and ten. The next stage is light stage often called stage two and at this point your respiratory system and body temperature drop. Your heart rate should also slow down as well during this part of sleep.

Both stage three and stage four of the sleep cycles are considered “deep sleep” and are certainly where normally you should have a problem being woken up. You might feel a bit dopey and unable to come awake promptly but this important sleep stage allows your brain to rest while the circulatory system slows, at which point it begins to rejuvenate the body. There is also a heightened level of immune action during these two stages of sleep.

REM sleep is stage five and is known as the dream portion of a good night’s rest. Entering and exiting this cycle happens many times during sleep so there may be several minutes or hours within the stage of REM sleep. This cycle is characterized by a number of physical responses where you may experience rapid breathing that is both irregular and shallow. There may also be a quickening of the pulse and blood pressure.

This important time in the sleep stage is vital to helping you process certain emotions for stress reduction and generally benefiting the person getting a good rest. Light sleepers are stuck in the early sleep stages and hardly ever make it to phases three and four where the best benefits of sleep reside. For those who have a hard time arousing from sleep possibly spend a longer period of time in deep sleep and rise suddenly when they wake up rather than travel through each stage on the way to waking up.

Sleep can be put off kilter based on how much time you spent in each cycle the evenings before, so if you spend more time in deep sleep one night you will likely sleep lightly the following evening. Your body adjusts over time and you spend the same about of time on average in each part of sleep, hopefully resulting in good sleep patterns. That’s why it is more true that you cannot make up on sleep but you can always make up on lost rest.