Everything You Need to Know About Sleep

To maintain good health, sleep is important. Sleep fixes the body and give the mind time to refresh. It is never in a still state and is always active even during sleep. The brain moves through stages when sleeping and repeats them through the night.Fatigue, mood alterations, and lack of memory, coordination, and concentration occur when the body lacks sleep. Your body is programmed to sleep around the same times each day. The amount of light is so important to your sleep schedule. When there is less light, there are hormones released into the brain to help induce sleep. Before there was electricity, people used to sleep between sunset and sunrise. That was around ten hours, which is what the average person got each day. Nowadays many people are deprived of essential sleep and this is not good to their health.

Make sure to get enough sleep

In developed nations, sleep deprivation is prevalent with most adults only getting between six and seven hours of sleep. These adults experience fatigue several times throughout the day. One in every six auto accidents happen due to sleeplessness. There are many causes of sleeplessness which include texting, internet, being a parent, shift at work, travel into different time zones, illness, medications, and poor sleeping habits. It is estimated that new parents in the first year lose between 450 and 700 hours of sleep.

Various sleep cycles

There are two distinct stages of sleep that every individual experiences. These two stages continue in a cycle throughout the sleep cycle. The first is rapid eye movement or REM sleep.

The second is non-rapid eye movement or NREM sleep. REM sleep occurs naturally every 90 minutes to 120 minutes. One quarter of your night’s sleep is in this stage. During this stage, the brain seems to be very active and the eyes dart around in the socket, which is where this stage got its name. It is the part of the sleep cycle where dreams occur. NREM sleep makes up the other three quarters of your sleep time and comes in four stages.

Stage one starts when you are dozing off or drowsy and you go from being awake to being asleep. Stage 2 is when your body temperature drops, you lose consciousness of what is around you, and your heart rate slows down.

The third and fourth stage come when you are in a deep sleep. Your muscles relax, your heart rate and breathing slow down, the body temperature drops, and the body grows and repairs itself.

Some disorders can interrupt the main sleep patterns and if this happens the body does not get the significant amount of sleep to grow and repair itself. These diseases, like insomnia, sleep restriction, sleep walking, night terrors, narcolepsy, and jet leg, can be treated with the proper diet, medications, and your doctor can help you with them.