The stages of sleep - what do we really
need to know?
Is there something to know about the stages
of sleep that is useful to us? Well, I've done some considerable
research to discover any information about sleep stages
that's we can actually use.
This is what I've found: There
are five stages of sleep that the body goes through - several
times a night - and our bodies need to go through all of
them for good health.
Certain things interfere with
the quality sleep and disrupt one or more of these stages.
Alcohol, prescription sleeping drugs and drugs in general,
poor nutrition,
a lack of physical
activity and unhandled stress
all reduce the quality of sleep and can all be causes of
sleep deprivation.
Of course, loud barking dogs or waking
up twenty times to go to the bathroom disrupts sleep too.
The body builds, repairs and recharges itself during
sleep so it is vital to good health to get consistent, quality
sleep.
I definitely feel better when I wake up
if I've had a good, uninterrupted night's sleep rather than
getting up a bunch of times during the night!
The majority of information to be found
about this subject concerns brain wave activity and eye
movement.
That's actually how four of the sleep
stages are defined, by the level of brain wave activity.
In the fifth stage, your eyeballs move rapidly... Interesting,
but what's the use of this data to us?
It's quite sufficient to know that since
the brain is the "command central" of the nervous
system, it is coordinating and controlling the body's activities
of building, repairing and recharging itself during sleep.
So there's your explanation of brain wave activity.
In summary, all we really need
to understand about the stages of sleep is that our bodies
need to go through all of them in order to build, repair
and rejuvenate itself. That includes the brain
and its functions.
The importance
of sleep to our mental and physical health becomes very
obvious when we lack sleep! And in many cases, it's just
a matter of learning how
to sleep better so that we can benefit from sleep.
Cheers!
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