![]() While memory consolidation happens during most stages of sleep, research suggests that it’s in this stage that your brain consolidates memories, such as general knowledge, like facts or statistics. Because it’s hardest to wake you in this stage of deep sleep, if you are stirred awake, you might feel groggier than you would if awakened during the other sleep stages, Drerup says. Deep sleep also refreshes the brain for encoding new memories the next day, Cline says.īrain activity in this stage is by marked by what’s called delta waves, or slow-wave sleep. It’s all about restorative sleep, physical recovery, and bolstering the immune system during this crucial stage. Your heartbeat and breathing slow down the most in stage 3, as your body and muscles fully relax, and it’s hardest to be awakened during this time. In this stage, you’re most disconnected from your waking life, according to Dr. This final stage of non-REM sleep is categorized as the deep sleep our bodies rely on to feel refreshed in the morning. That messaging process is thought to be how your brain turns short-term memories into long-term ones, he explains.ĭrerup says we spend the most time in stage 2 sleep - about 50 percent of the night, for about 20 to 60 minutes per cycle. 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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