Deep Sleep
Each stage of sleep offers benefits to the sleeper. However, deep sleep is perhaps the
most vital stage. It is the first stage that the brain attempts to recover when sleep
deprived, and the strongest effects of sleep deprivation are from inadequate deep sleep.
What might disrupt deep sleep? If you are caring for someone around the clock, whether
it is a small infant or an elderly relative with a serious illness, you might need to
attend to them suddenly in the middle of the night. Loud noise outside or inside the
home might wake you. If you work the night shift, sleeping during the day may be
difficult, due to light and excess noise during the day. Substances like alcohol and
nicotine also disrupt deep sleep.
Maximize your deep sleep. Make sure your sleep environment is as comfortable as possible
and minimize outside noise. If you are being awakened as a caregiver, make sure that you
get some time of uninterrupted sleep, especially if you have had some unusually
disruptive nights. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
REM sleep
REM sleep, or dream sleep, is essential to our minds for processing and
consolidating emotions, memories and stress. It is also thought to be vital to
learning, stimulating the brain regions used in learning and developing new skills.
Most of dreaming occurs during REM sleep, although it can happen during other sleep
stages as well. There are different theories as to why you dream. Freud thought that
dreams were the processing of unconscious desires. Today, researchers wonder if it
may be the brain’s way of processing random fragments of information received during
the day. Much of dreaming is still a mystery. If REM sleep is disrupted one night,
your body will go through more REM the next to catch up on this sleep stage.
Getting more REM sleep
Studies have shown that better REM sleep helps boost your mood during the day. How
can you get more REM sleep? One simple way is to try to sleep a little more in the
morning. As your sleep cycles through the night, it starts with longer periods of
deep sleep. By the morning, the REM sleep stage is longer. Try sleeping an extra
half hour to hour and see if your mood improves.
Improving your overall sleep will also increase your REM sleep. If your body is
deprived of deep sleep, it will try to make that up first- at the expense of REM sleep.
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