Since REM sleep is temperature sensitive, your best bet is to find a sleeping temperature that is just right! Consider whether your bedding is too heavy or too thin-and while you’re at it, make sure your mattress isn’t part of the problem, too. Specifically, it can prevent you from entering REM sleep at all… even if it doesn’t wake you up. The temperature around you-either too hot or too cold-has an effect on REM sleep. So if you’re still trying to log REM hours when the rest of the world wakes up, that’s not going to help matters. This is because your REM sleep is concentrated towards the end of your sleep cycle. No matter how many hours you get, the earlier you start, the better. Since each sleep cycle can last from 90 minutes to 2 hours, you’ll need at least 7.5 hours of sleep a night. Therefore, to improve your REM sleep (read: getting more REM sleep every night) you need to get the maximum number of sleep cycles as possible. This is why skimping on sleep is never a good idea.įollow these tips to support the quality and quantity of your REM sleep: So the shorter your shuteye, the less quality REM sleep you’re going to get. REM sleep cycles are longer in the latter half of your night. (This is one reason why you need between 7 and 9 hours of uninterrupted sleep as an adult: the less sleep you have, the fewer sleep cycles you complete.) REM sleep lasts about 90 minutes per cycle, and if you should experience it a few times every night. Some scientists speculate that this is why dreams sometimes have a chaotic nature to them.

But the different parts of your brain aren’t as coordinated as they would be during the day. Your brain activity actually increases, nearing the same levels as when you’re awake. This is the final phase in the cycle, and it’s when you dream.

It’s important to know that as you sleep, N3 stages get shorter-you get the most “deep sleep” in the first half of the night.

Deep sleep is also important to your immune health.ĭuring any given sleep cycle, you’ll be in deep sleep for 20-40 minutes. Your muscles, pulse and breathing will be at their most relaxed during deep sleep. Sleep scientists are sure this stage is critical for healthy sleep, because it’s when your body recharges itself. This is where your brain starts creating delta waves. Your brain waves have a new pattern during N2 as well-one that actually helps it resist being woken up by external noises or stimuli. So what happens during N2? You begin to really relax: your body temperature drops, your muscles relax, breathing and heart rate slows down and eye movement stops. So much so that you’ll spend about half your total sleep cycle in N2 sleep every night. This phase lasts for 10-25 minutes, and can get longer as your sleep cycle repeats itself during the night. If this happens often, try limiting caffeine in the hours before bed and relaxing a little bit: stress has been linked to hypnic jerks. The muscles relax, your mind freaks out, and you jolt awake. It’s very common and while there’s no set theory for what causes this phenomenon, it’s generally agreed that what you’re experiencing is your body muscles relaxing at once in preparation for sleep, but your brain isn’t all the way unconscious yet. Have you ever felt like you were falling right before you fell asleep? That’s called a hypnic or hypnogogic jerk-and relax, its nothing to worry about. Here’s how that cycle works, and how it’s possible to skip the stage we all need the most. That’s why not getting enough REM can have a long-term impact on your brain health.īut you were in bed all night-how could you have not experienced enough REM? You don’t get to the rapid eye movement phase until you’re in the fourth stage of sleep, in a 4-stage sleep cycle that repeats itself several times during a typical 8 hours of sleeping. What we do know: REM sleep is essential to the cognitive processes of learning and memory, and is thought to be when your brain collates data and turns short term memories into long term ones. The exact function of REM sleep is still a mystery, albeit a well-studied one. (Think about all of that blinking you do in a typical day!) Your heart rate is higher during REM sleep than the rest of the night-perhaps it’s those exciting (or scary) dreams. It’s also called “paradoxical sleep,” because your body’s motor functions, brain activity and yes, eye movements, are very similar to what they are when you’re awake. REM stands for “rapid eye movement,” and it’s the phase of sleep when we dream.

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