Sleep Factor: Sleep 101 Part 2 - Sleep stages
Hello Everyone and welcome back to the work IN I'm your host Ericka Thomas, and this is part two of our sleep factor101. Today, we are going to be talking about the stages of sleep. And what is happening in those stages of sleep, and which ones are more important. We just want to get a real good picture of what a good night's sleep looks like what is normal. What is abnormal. And how can we use this information to really find our way back, and support our health With a healthy night's sleep.
Transcript
0:46
So we're gonna get started with a quick explanation of the stages of sleep, versus cycles of sleep. So we have four stages of sleep actually five, if you include waking as a stage of sleep, which some doctors do Waking the W. For our intent and purpose today we are going to be looking at the four stages of sleep now stages of sleep are different than sleep cycles. Okay, so a sleep cycle is where you move through three or four of those stages asleep, and we might have many sleep cycles, during the night. I know a lot of people who wear technology that can monitor their sleep cycles during the evening, and it can tell you how long you have spent in any of these stages, but not many of those pieces of tech actually explain much about those stages, why they're important what's going on there. And so that's what I want to take some time to do today.
So, let's talk first about stage one stage one is non REM sleep. Now, there are actually three stages of non REM sleep that you're going to move through. And then one stage is the REM sleep. So we're going to start with stage one stage one non REM is where we change over from wakefulness to sleep. This is the first step in this is when you're dozing.
2:45
You can think of it like that. Now I don't know about you but I have experienced this I know a lot of people have maybe you've seen someone dozing on the train, or on the couch and all of a sudden they jump, or Twitch. Maybe you've experienced that as well.
3:02
That happens during stage one non REM sleep during this very short period, sometimes it's just a couple minutes sometimes it's several minutes but it's very light sleep. This is where your heartbeat starts to slow down your breathing starts to slow down your eye movements start to slow down and your muscles will begin to relax with just a few of those occasional occasional twitches, okay. If you were hooked up to some machine, you would see that your brainwaves would just begin to slow down from their daytime wakefulness patterns. Okay, you're not going to be able to feel that but you'll feel the rest of the list right that's slowing down this very short stage one non REM stage two, non REM sleep is a period of light sleep, that that happens right before you enter deeper sleep so it's again kind of a transition thing. Right. Your heartbeat and breathing are slowing down a little bit more your muscles relax even further. Now is when your body temperature starts to drop, and your eye movements are going to stop. Okay, so this is where brain activity is is slow, but it's marked still by some brief bursts some little bursts of electrical activity, not that you would feel that you wouldn't feel that at all. But it's still kind of a transition period now you spend more of your repeated sleep patterns in this stage to sleep, than any of your other sleep stages so you might notice that on your little Fitbit, right, or your Orose stage three non REM sleep. This is a period of very deep sleep, that you need to feel refreshed in the morning. If you don't get enough sleep here in stage three non REM. This is where you're going to wake up still feeling tired, it's going to occur. Typically, I'm just going to say typically because everyone is different, right. It occurs typically in longer periods during the first half of the night, or the first half of your, your sleep pattern. Okay, so that's normally when you're going to get more of that non REM sleep that stage three non REM. Your heartbeat and breathing are going to slow to your left to their lowest levels during the night during this stage of sleep. And this is where your muscles are really super relaxed, it might be very difficult to wake you up out of this stage of sleep.
5:59
This is where your brainwaves are going to get even slower than anything else, very very slow. Okay. But this stage, stage three non REM is absolutely critical. If you're going to have restorative sleep, this is where it happens. Okay, this is where the body is allowed to recover physically. This is where you get the growth hormone. In for muscle development, if you are a lifter if you're exercising hard and you want stronger muscles, you need this kind of sleep for your body to be able to make that happen for you. If you are going to nap. You need to find a way to get into this kind of sleep, quickly, and do it. After that workout. Okay.
6:55
This is also where. Studies have shown that it might be, where the, the immune system gets a boost. Okay, so it's not just about your, your physical body strength repairing muscles and things like that but also repairing areas, other areas of the body like your, your gut health, and some other key bodily processes, including cleaning clearing toxification out of the brain, the liver, that gut bacteria and understand we spoke a little bit about circadian rhythm. In part one, but understand that every system in your body also has a circadian rhythm. Okay. It all responds to some kind of cycle of rest and activity. And so when we get into this stage three non REM, it's super important for all of our systems in the body. So, even though our brain activity is very reduced in this, in this particular stage.
8:15
There's evidence that this particular type of sleep this restorative sleep is necessary to help us handle critical thinking, creativity, problem solving, and memory. Okay, that's going to be important in just a moment but it's definitely important with our memory, and in some.
8:40
In some cases neurologists will talk to you about something called microglia.
8:50
And this is a little garbage collector cleaner that lives in the brain. And he comes out in stage three, non run and cleans out any nasty little byproducts, because everything in the body creates some kind of byproducts cleans out the brain so we can think clearer. Okay. And that is another major reason we need to spend some good quality time and this particular stage of sleep. Alright, so let's look at the fourth stage, which is pretty common. I think a lot of people know what rapid eye movement sleep is this REM sleep the idea of it is anyway so we're going to go a little bit deeper into this stage of sleep. So, typically it will occur, about, I should say it'll occur. First, about 90 minutes after we fall asleep. Okay.
9:52
But remember we cycle through these stages so we may have multiple options, multiple times, where we can get into that REM sleep. All right, in RAM Your eyes are moving rapidly from side to side that's where we get the name of it rapid eye movement right moving rapidly side to side from behind our closed eyes, eyelids. There's a mixed frequency of brain activity that becomes really close to what you see when you're awake. So a lot of these stages, I think, are based on the brain activity. Right. So, it's about ram on the screen will look a lot like being awake. This is where you're where you dream. We dream, a lot in RAM. So we've got a lot of pictures, coming into our head during REM sleep.
10:52
Not only does the brain activity pick up but your breathing becomes faster and sometimes really irregular and your heart rate and your blood pressure is going to increase up to near waking levels. So you can imagine if you're dreaming about running and running away from someone in your dream that that would be reflected in your heart rate and your blood pressure as well. Most, like I said most of your dreaming occurs in REM sleep, and some of it, some of it might also occur in that stage three non REM as well.
11:27
In REM your arm and like your arms and legs, the muscles there become temporarily paralyzed. And that is supposed to prevent you from acting out your dreams.
11:43
As you age. You sleep less of your time in REM sleep.
11:52
However, memory consolidation happens in both REM and non REM specifically stage three non REM, right, most likely. Now, keep in mind, they do studies on this all the time and they're always learning new things, so they don't know everything. we don't know everything about the stages of sleep, or what the brain does. There's a lot going on in there, and so keep that in mind, but memory consolidation is an important piece to our sleep pattern. Okay. For many people, especially as they age, one of those biggest big fears that we have is to lose our memory right. And if there's something that we can do to support keeping our memory and our cognition and supporting our, our cognitive function, then we want to do it, and so sleeping better is a great way to support that our sleep stages are really important because they all allow the brain and the body to recuperate and develop on some level. All right, and failure if we cannot obtain enough of both deep sleep in that stage three non REM, and our REM sleep.
13:24
It can have some pretty profound consequences on our cognitive function on our emotional regulation on our physical health. Okay, so let's talk about some of those. So, non REM sleep is associated with really low levels of what they call cortical arousal, which he at a fancy word but what what they are, we're looking at in some of these studies is creativity. And so, when we get a lot of non REM sleep. We can be much more creative in our thinking and problem solving. When we get less, we have much less capacity for that type of thought. Brands sleep enhances our creative problem solving, so I don't know have you Has this ever happened to you where you have a some issue some tough thing that you're working through during the day you just can't wrap your head around it, and then you go to sleep you have some random dream and you wake up and all of a sudden, the answer is there in your brain somehow magically appears in your brain. That is what happens when REM is helping with creative problem solving. You can sleep on it. And the answer just will come to you.
14:52
The other piece to that is, when we are learning. Okay, so the same thing happens when we're learning something brand new or trying to retain new knowledge, right, so we can cram and cram and cram stuff into our brain. But it doesn't stick there until we sleep. And the reason it doesn't stick there is because sleep is where we consolidate our memories, where we move information from short to long term.
15:28
And we learned in our part one of this series, where that happens in the brain, where those structures are working so we're working through the thalamus, and we're working through the amygdala, and we're making those connections, and that all happens during these great sleep stages. Stage three non REM and REM sleep, especially. Now, this is maybe something that we are not quite aware of, but there is a bidirectional relationship between sleep issues and depression. What that means bi directional relationship means that we don't often see one without the other.
16:19
So, poor sleep can contribute to the development of depression and having depression, makes someone more likely to have or develop sleep issues, insomnia or sleep deprivation or, or even hyper hypersomnia, which means you're sleeping too much. Okay, so sleep issues, contribute to the development of depression through the changes in the functioning of the neurotransmitter called serotonin. Okay. So, we know that serotonin is a major player in our sense of well being, it's kind of some people call it the happy hormones like when you feel good about yourself about your day you have a lot of serotonin running around, but sleep disruptions can affect the body's stress system, and the body's level of serotonin which can result in depression and disrupt your circadian rhythm and increase that vulnerability, for not just depression but other mental health issues as well. So some of those, those sleep disorders or issues, you know we have been talking about insomnia, or, you know, just having a difficulty getting to sleep or staying asleep hypersomnia which I mentioned which is sleeping too much obstructive sleep apnea, this is, this is an issue for people. Because it interrupts, all of those stages of sleep. Okay, so obstructive sleep apnea. If you don't know what that is. Think about someone who snores or flat out stops breathing, and then has to gasp for breath. Okay. So, it can be very disruptive, but it's so common. Both sleep apnea and insomnia, are so common, we think of these things as normal. We just accept being tired all the time, as normal, but it's really just common, common isn't normal common doesn't mean that's the way things should be. And we can take some, some steps to affect that. And we definitely want to do that so that we can eliminate the risk of some of these things.
Now, sleeping our sleep pattern in general is important for learning and memory we touched on this a little bit ago. But, research has suggested that, how we sleep affects our learning and memory in two very distinct ways. The first is that a sleep deprived person cannot focus their attention optimally. And therefore they can't learn efficiently. Now remember what I said before, the body. Once easy, it wants to do some, it wants to do basically everything in the most efficient way possible. So if we are making things harder for ourselves by not getting a good sleep. We're making it harder for the body to learn anything. It's going to just do it a different way. Okay, so the brain will just choose a different way, something easier.
20:08
The second way that Sleep Affects learning and memory is that sleeping itself plays that role and consolidation of, of our memories. Okay, so whatever it is that you have been exposed to that you're trying to learn during the day.
20:28
It is during sleep, where that sticks in your brain. Okay, it's absolutely essential. If you are trying to learn something, and then you never go to sleep.
20:41
Just see how how easy it is for you to remember that thing. Okay sleep deprivation is no joke. That's why they use it for torture, we want to take this information about our sleep stages, and look at how you are sleeping, every night.
21:04
If you have a Fitbit, or an moros or one of those other tech devices that can tell you how long you spent in each of these stages of sleep. This is going to give you a baseline, something to work with. And now we understand a little bit more about the structures in the brain that are responsible for our sleep patterns, and some of these stages. Next time we're going to talk about some of the waking habits that we can adopt. They're easy to super simple things that we can do every day during the day, that will help our body, find the easiest way into a great night's sleep. So I hope you'll join me next time, thanks for joining me today, and I'll see you next time on the work in.
21:59
Thanks for joining me on the work and if you'd like what you heard, and you're looking for a little bit more, head over to elemental kinetics.com, forward slash free dash resources for more ways to help you get a great night's sleep.
I’m Ericka
Whether your fight is on the frontline or the home front, past or present, personal or professional... chronic stress & stress injury can be a debilitating enemy.
Join me as we explore natural balanced ways to work through the body to re-establish safety in the body and find recovery for lasting resilience to all sources of stress, tension & anxiety.
I offer online, on demand private sessions, courses & memberships for individuals, small groups and corporate clients looking to build resilience and recover from stress injury.