The complexities of sleep: How to get a good night's rest

Much more complex than previously believed, sleep’s many intricate phases play distinct roles in helping you rest well at night and feel rejuvenated the next day.

August 1, 2023
The complexities of sleep: How to get a good night's rest

The average adult needs between 7 to 9 hours of sleep every night, an amount equivalent to over a third of one’s entire lifespan. Why do we need so much sleep to live a healthy life? Answering this question requires a deep appreciation of how sleep works, and how those mechanisms relate to the health benefits that sleep provides. From that understanding, we can then determine how best to leverage the inner workings of sleep to ensure a good night’s rest. The payoff: when sleep quality is high, consistently, the risks of long-term mental health and metabolic disorders are reduced. 

How does sleep work?

A good night’s sleep is not just a single phase of unconsciousness that you enter before waking up in the morning. Rather, sleep is divided into two phases that cycle throughout the night: 

  • Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep begins about an hour and a half after you fall asleep. REM sleep is characterized by several bodily changes, including a temporary loss of muscle tone, darting eyes underneath closed eyelids, irregular breathing, and twitching limbs.
  • Non-rapid eye movement (NREM): NREM sleep constitutes the restful phase of sleep. Here, a person’s brain activity, breathing, and heart rate slow down to facilitate the transition into deep sleep.

NREM sleep is also further divided into three stages that are cycled alongside the two phases:

  • The N1 stage lasts only one to five minutes. It acts as a transitory stage of rest, featuring light changes in brain activity accompanied by periodic muscle twitches. While a sleeping person can be woken up easily in this phase, they can also quickly transition into the other two stages of NREM sleep.
  • After exiting N1, a person will enter Stage N2. Usually lasting 30 to 60 minutes each cycle, your body will begin to reduce its body temperature and continue lowering its heartbeat, breathing, muscle activity, and eye movement.
  • The N3 stage is the final and deepest stage in NREM sleep. Here, your body will have the lowest physical activity. Your body’s activity is so low that if you are awoken during this stage of sleep, you’re likely to demonstrate mental fogginess for up to an hour before recovering full mental faculties. 

What happens to your body when you sleep

The complexities of sleep have spurred researchers onward to study the physiological processes that happen to your body when you sleep. 

Benefits and risks of adequate sleep and sleep deprivation

As discussed above, your body undergoes many physiological changes that help you get the night’s rest you need. Even so, the perception of long periods of inactivity may cause people to adopt negative attitudes toward sleep that reduce sleep quality. However, we can not state enough the importance of having a good night’s sleep. Sleeping well at night provides a host of health benefits:

Disruptions can come in many forms, such as sleep restriction, sleep fragmentation, and disrupted sleep patterns. Each of these perturbations increases the risk of disease:

How to get a good night’s sleep

With the myriad benefits and risks that come with adequate sleep and sleep disruptions, respectively, the importance of having a good night’s sleep should not be ignored. Here are some suggestions that you can implement to ensure a good night’s rest:

Key takeaways

Sleep provides an important opportunity for daily, prolonged rest from the everyday grind of life. But sleeping is not merely a single-step process. Rather, sleep occurs as a complex cycle of phases and stages that help your body regain the energy it needs to go about the next day. Establishing a healthy, habitual sleep routine also provides long-term mental health and metabolic benefits that increase your longevity and well-being. Despite its importance, almost half of all Americans fail to get a good night’s rest — even though there are relatively easy, straightforward ways to improve sleep. Exercising, adopting a healthy diet, and limiting the use of electronic devices are three of the more effective practices that can help you find peace in a good night’s sleep again.

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