They look like little spindles on a sewing machine - these are neurons sending messages from your short-term memory to your long-term memory,” Landsness says. “There’s something very beautiful about it. Sleep spindles (patterns of brain waves) fire, indicating that NREM sleep is occurring.Īs the sensory nervous system (sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch) turns off for the day, sleep spindle activity indicates that memory processing of the day’s events is happening in the brain. Landsness says that electroencephalograms that monitor brain activity while patients sleep reveal how interesting brain wave activity looks during this stage. Your heartbeat, eye movements, and breathing slow down your muscles relax and your brain activity begins to taper off.ĭr. This first stage is when you’re just drifting off to slumber. Stage 1 kicks off the sleep cycle, as we transition from wakefulness to a light sleep. Here’s what researchers know so far about the four stages of sleep: Stage 1 Non-REM (Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep A lot of the work in the field has to do with theorizing what may be happening when we’re resting, based on studying sleep patterns and brain waves in patients in a sleep lab. Drerup adds a big caveat right off the bat that there’s still a lot that researchers don’t know about what happens in our brains during sleep. There are four unique sleep stages - three that are classified as non-REM (NREM) sleep, followed by the fourth stage, REM sleep. So while your loved ones may describe you as a lump on a log when you’re passed out in bed, there’s a lot going on underneath your eye mask. In a nutshell, our brains transition through four different stages of sleep several times throughout the night, says Michelle Drerup, PsyD, a psychologist and director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at the Cleveland Clinic. Here’s a closer look at the stages of sleep that make up a sleep cycle and why each stage is so critical for good health and ensuring that we wake up feeling refreshed and well rested. Cycling through all the sleep stages enough times makes for optimal physical, emotional, and cognitive health, he explains. “Think of sleep in a way as similar to nutrition, where we want to get a balanced set of sleep stages (just like you want to include a balance of different micro- and macronutrients in a healthy diet), as each seems to serve an important function,” says John Cline, PhD, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at the Yale School of Medicine and fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. It’s our ability to progress through the various sleep stages (and spend enough time in the deepest ones) that determines whether we’re getting high-quality rest. That is why sleep quality, in addition to sleep quantity, is important. As you sleep, your brain cycles through four separate sleep stages, each with distinct patterns of activity and each playing a pivotal part in helping you get a good night of slumber. From physical restoration to memory consolidation to dreaming, there’s a lot going on in the body and brain when we power down for the day and go to sleep.
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