Have you ever noticed how sometimes you wake up feeling like Superman, while other times you feel like you’ve been run over by a lorry? Well, let me tell you, it’s not just about the amount of sleep you get. Today, let’s unravel the mystery behind your ‘sleep cycle’!
I remember once I was working non-stop for days, and finally, on a Friday night, I decided to have a ‘sleep marathon’. But guess what? I slept for a whole 10 hours, and yet I woke up feeling like a soggy fish. What on earth was going on?
So, I embarked on a quest to solve this puzzle, and it brought us to today’s topic – the secret of the sleep cycle. As it turns out, our sleep isn’t as straightforward as just passing out until the morning. Instead, it’s divided into multiple ‘adventure stages’, with each stage lasting about 90 minutes, and each with its own role in restoring our bodies.
Every night, our sleep is like a ‘magical circus’, involving Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep and Non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) sleep. NREM is further divided into four stages. The first and second stages are like sleeping on a feather bed, where you can wake up just by a whisper. Then, we enter the third and fourth stages – the ‘deep sleep forest’, where your body goes into a deep rest mode. Finally, we reach the REM stage, the most magical time of the night, where our brains throw a party, and dreams happen.
To get to the bottom of this, I conducted a crazy experiment – setting an alarm to wake me up every 90 minutes for several nights. Sure enough, waking up at different stages felt incredibly different. When I woke up during the light sleep stages, I felt like I had just left a spa. But waking up from deep sleep? I felt like I had just risen from the dead!
So, if you’ve ever been jolted awake during a deep sleep stage, it’s no wonder you feel like you’ve been hit by a tractor. Some might wonder, “Should I wake up during light sleep instead?” Absolutely! This is where those nifty sleep cycle smart alarms come in handy. They track your sleep stages and wake you up when you’re closest to naturally waking up. How cool is that?