Sleep-patterns-explained
Sleep, we all need it, generally we all love it, to get into a nice warm bed, preferably with a person we love and to have a great nights' sleep. At the end of which we wake up feeling energised and refreshed and ready for a great day on this wonderful planet earth.
But it doesn't always pan out that way does it?
A lot of people, have sleep problems and as I am not a sleep expert I can't cover every issue, but instead wish to share with you my person experience based on the research I have carried out and person trials!
About two years ago I was having sleep problems, not so much getting to sleep but instead my problems were to do with tiredness during the day. I spent most of the day tired and I knew this was bad, so I researched sleep and sleep patterns and discovered that;
- Humans need between 4 and 8 hours of sleep per night, and more specifically
- We need 4 "REM" sleeps per 24 hours
Now this second point is actually more important. Firstly what is REM and what is a sleep pattern?
Sleep Patterns
During a nights' sleep we actually follow a cycle - I'd like to do a graph here but currently don't know how so I'll just explain it verbally as best I can. Visualise a wave graph, the left-hand vertical axis is consciousness with awake at the top and heavy sleep at the bottom. The bottom or horizontal axis is time.
REM stands for "rapid eye movement", this is the phase of sleep when we are most unconscious and when we dream, this is the important part of sleep if you like, we must have 4 of these REM sleep per night. So in our wave graph with time along the bottom, we start awake and then gradually fall into a deep sleep when we start REM phase 1, once finished we gradually move up into a more conscious state and then we start the cycle again back down into heavy sleep and REM phase 2, this process continues through the night and at least 4 REM phases.
What I have just described is "normal" adult sleep pattern and is called mono-phasic, i.e. one phase of sleep incorporating 4 or more REMs. Now there are human beings on this planet who don't follow this pattern and mainly these are babies. Babies follow a different pattern, they have a number of sleeps during a 24 hour period in which they have 1 REM sleep each time, approximately once every 4 hours they sleep, following the same pattern described above going from consciousness to deep sleep and REM and then all the way back up to being awake, often accompanied by the waaaah, waaaah of hunger!
As parents, this sleep pattern doesn't work for us as the employee work place does not cater for it, though I understand that some Chinese employers do provide sleep pods for short naps, but more on that later, so we gradually educate our offspring out of poly-phasic sleep into mono-phasic sleep.
Personal Experience
Following my research I discovered some logic - if you sleep for 6 hours one night, 8 hours the next, then 9, then 7, your poor brain has no idea; how long you will sleep for, how long it has to get these 4 REMs in & what time you will awaken - if your alarm clock goes off right in the middle of REM then it's going to take a while to reach consciousness and even when you do you will feel very groggy. My personal experiment then was to fix my time asleep - now if you do this it doesn't really matter whether you pick 8hrs, 7hrs or 4hrs, I would not recommend going below 4 hours as you will need 4 REM sleeps and although each cycle lasts around 20-30 mins so in theory you could get 4 REMs done in as little as 80mins! However, general study tells us that 4 hours is a sensible minimum. I generally have 5 hours sleep per night - when I go to bed I tend to read until I am I tired enough to sleep, I set a countdown timer on my phone for 5 hours, I calculate what time that would be so say I go to sleep at midnight, it'll be 5am, so I say to myself 5am, 5am, 5am as I fall off to sleep, this appears to help ingrain the wake time into my subconscious to assist with the wake-up. Now, this will not fix the 5 hour sleep pattern over night! I expected to give it a month and then re-asses, it actually took about 10 days - and yes I did it for 7 days a week, you have to if you want to succeed at this.
A couple of words of caution
You need strong will power, especially those first few days, when the alarm goes off you must get up immediately, no "just 5 more minutes" no pressing the snooze, just GET UP. That first week is tough, but it gets much easier...honest. During the day you will have bouts of tiredness, very draining tiredness sometimes. don't ignore them and don't have a coffee or chocolate bar and just work through it. Instead, take 5-10mins to just sit quietly in a chair, close your eyes and just relax your whole body, set a timer if you like and don't get too comfy, don't lie down or you will probably sleep, which is okay as long as you're not at work, I recommend popping out to your car or even nipping to the loo! For these "waking naps" you want to be supporting yourself, then if you do nod off you will wake yourself up...we've all done that I'm sure, where your head is suddenly too heavy!
The result was that I felt much better through the day and those needs to nap became far less intense, I still did them but I didn't feel so exhausted. These days I tend to flit between setting my number of hours and have found that it is all quite easy. It takes me or 2 or 3 nights to get into a pattern and the during the day tiredness is rarely very intense.
I hope you found this information useful and that it made sense, there are a number of resources on the web or course and I recommend you Google some and read up on sleep patterns for yourself, this just might help you as it helped me.
January 2015
But it doesn't always pan out that way does it?
A lot of people, have sleep problems and as I am not a sleep expert I can't cover every issue, but instead wish to share with you my person experience based on the research I have carried out and person trials!
About two years ago I was having sleep problems, not so much getting to sleep but instead my problems were to do with tiredness during the day. I spent most of the day tired and I knew this was bad, so I researched sleep and sleep patterns and discovered that;
- Humans need between 4 and 8 hours of sleep per night, and more specifically
- We need 4 "REM" sleeps per 24 hours
Now this second point is actually more important. Firstly what is REM and what is a sleep pattern?
Sleep Patterns
During a nights' sleep we actually follow a cycle - I'd like to do a graph here but currently don't know how so I'll just explain it verbally as best I can. Visualise a wave graph, the left-hand vertical axis is consciousness with awake at the top and heavy sleep at the bottom. The bottom or horizontal axis is time.
REM stands for "rapid eye movement", this is the phase of sleep when we are most unconscious and when we dream, this is the important part of sleep if you like, we must have 4 of these REM sleep per night. So in our wave graph with time along the bottom, we start awake and then gradually fall into a deep sleep when we start REM phase 1, once finished we gradually move up into a more conscious state and then we start the cycle again back down into heavy sleep and REM phase 2, this process continues through the night and at least 4 REM phases.
What I have just described is "normal" adult sleep pattern and is called mono-phasic, i.e. one phase of sleep incorporating 4 or more REMs. Now there are human beings on this planet who don't follow this pattern and mainly these are babies. Babies follow a different pattern, they have a number of sleeps during a 24 hour period in which they have 1 REM sleep each time, approximately once every 4 hours they sleep, following the same pattern described above going from consciousness to deep sleep and REM and then all the way back up to being awake, often accompanied by the waaaah, waaaah of hunger!
As parents, this sleep pattern doesn't work for us as the employee work place does not cater for it, though I understand that some Chinese employers do provide sleep pods for short naps, but more on that later, so we gradually educate our offspring out of poly-phasic sleep into mono-phasic sleep.
Personal Experience
Following my research I discovered some logic - if you sleep for 6 hours one night, 8 hours the next, then 9, then 7, your poor brain has no idea; how long you will sleep for, how long it has to get these 4 REMs in & what time you will awaken - if your alarm clock goes off right in the middle of REM then it's going to take a while to reach consciousness and even when you do you will feel very groggy. My personal experiment then was to fix my time asleep - now if you do this it doesn't really matter whether you pick 8hrs, 7hrs or 4hrs, I would not recommend going below 4 hours as you will need 4 REM sleeps and although each cycle lasts around 20-30 mins so in theory you could get 4 REMs done in as little as 80mins! However, general study tells us that 4 hours is a sensible minimum. I generally have 5 hours sleep per night - when I go to bed I tend to read until I am I tired enough to sleep, I set a countdown timer on my phone for 5 hours, I calculate what time that would be so say I go to sleep at midnight, it'll be 5am, so I say to myself 5am, 5am, 5am as I fall off to sleep, this appears to help ingrain the wake time into my subconscious to assist with the wake-up. Now, this will not fix the 5 hour sleep pattern over night! I expected to give it a month and then re-asses, it actually took about 10 days - and yes I did it for 7 days a week, you have to if you want to succeed at this.
A couple of words of caution
You need strong will power, especially those first few days, when the alarm goes off you must get up immediately, no "just 5 more minutes" no pressing the snooze, just GET UP. That first week is tough, but it gets much easier...honest. During the day you will have bouts of tiredness, very draining tiredness sometimes. don't ignore them and don't have a coffee or chocolate bar and just work through it. Instead, take 5-10mins to just sit quietly in a chair, close your eyes and just relax your whole body, set a timer if you like and don't get too comfy, don't lie down or you will probably sleep, which is okay as long as you're not at work, I recommend popping out to your car or even nipping to the loo! For these "waking naps" you want to be supporting yourself, then if you do nod off you will wake yourself up...we've all done that I'm sure, where your head is suddenly too heavy!
The result was that I felt much better through the day and those needs to nap became far less intense, I still did them but I didn't feel so exhausted. These days I tend to flit between setting my number of hours and have found that it is all quite easy. It takes me or 2 or 3 nights to get into a pattern and the during the day tiredness is rarely very intense.
I hope you found this information useful and that it made sense, there are a number of resources on the web or course and I recommend you Google some and read up on sleep patterns for yourself, this just might help you as it helped me.
January 2015
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