Posts Tagged ‘heart rate’

How To Sleep Cycles?

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

If you are having problems sleeping knowing how you rest or knowing the mechanism behind what produces a healthy night’s sleep could be instrumental in comprehending why you have a slumber disorder. Rest is not as easy as you believe because of the various levels of sleep. There are numerous slumber processes that occur immediately you start to drift off to slumber that determines how well you will rest.

Sleep Cycles

Drowsiness is the first stage of sleeping and this is where your muscles relax, you start to feel tired, and you can no longer keep your eyes open. This stage usually lasts only a few minutes somewhere around ten full minutes. The next stage is light stage often called stage two and in this stage both breathing rate plus temperature fall considerably. Your heart rate should also lag at this point in the sleep process.

Stages three and four are easily considered “deep sleep” and are certainly where normally you should have a problem being woken up. You may feel groggy and be unable to adjust quickly but this vital stage in sleep allows the brain to truly “turn off” as your circulation slows, at which point it begins to rejuvenate the body. There is also a heightened level of immune action during these two important stages of rest.

Stage five is considered REM sleep and is generally thought of as the dreaming phase of the sleep cycle. Entering and exiting this cycle happens many times during sleep so you might have anywhere from three to five 70-90 minute long sessions within the stage of REM sleep. This part of the sleep process is defined by several physical conditions such as various types of breathing that are both shallow and deep. You could also show signs of your heart quickening as a rise in 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. People who sleep lightly are usually in stage two and rarely go into 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 quickly upon waking rather than running through each stage.

Sleep stages can become random based upon the amount of each cycle you got the night before so if you spend a long time in deep sleep you might become trapped in a light sleep the next evening. Ultimately however it balances out and you spend the same about of time on average in each part of sleep, hopefully resulting in good sleep patterns. That is why it is more accurate to say that you won’t catch up on sleep but you can always make up on lost rest.