Why You Need Sleep, How Much You Need, and How to Get More
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You may not remember everything that happens each night when you’re asleep, but if you’re doing it right, there’s a lot going on in your brain and your body, Pelayo says. “There are differences between sleep and awake for every single body system but nothing as dramatic as the changes of consciousness during sleep,” he says.
Stage 2: Non-REM Sleep In the second stage, your heart rate drops, and your body temperature falls even more. Eye movement stops completely, and your brain slows way down, except for brief bursts of activity.
Stage 3: Non-REM Sleep Next comes deep sleep. This stage is heavy and restorative. Your heartbeat and breathing slow down the most during this type of sleep, and now is the time when it’s hardest to awake.
Learn More About the Sleep Cycles and the Stages of Sleep
What Drives Sleep
Then there’s our circadian rhythm, our body’s biological clock, which syncs our body functions with environmental cues. These internal clocks are what drive us to feel sleepy at night and more awake in the morning (even, for instance, if you slept poorly the previous night, or pulled an all-nighter). They’re regulated by hormones, such as the stress hormone cortisol and the sleep hormone melatonin, which get secreted by the brain to send these wake and sleep signals to the body.
“They’re two complementary systems in the brain,” Pelayo says. And when there’s a discrepancy between the homeostatic drive to sleep and the signal to sleep that comes from the circadian system, problems like jet lag and other disordered sleep occur.
“This is why people who wake up at different times every day may feel tired a lot,” Pelayo says. “The brain doesn’t know how to predict when they should be awake. It’s like being constantly jet-lagged.”
The more sleep researchers learn about these two systems that control sleep, the more it is clear why not only sufficient hours of sleep but also good sleep habits (such as going to sleep and waking up at the same time each day) are important.
Learn More About Your Circadian Rhythm and How It Affects Sleep
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