Sleep (or a lack of it) was where my journey started. If I hadn’t been struggling to get more than a couple of hours a night, who knows—we might not even be here on a Sunday morning.
All of this is a convoluted way of saying that sleep matters to me, and because March is Sleep Awareness Month (really), we’re going to get stuck into all things shuteye.
Let’s start with the basics, what are the different stages of sleep? Most of you have probably heard of REM (either as the band, or the sleep stage), which stands for rapid eye movement, but did you know there’s also a stage called non-rapid eye movement (NREM)? Or to be precise, there are three different types of NREM. Let’s have a look.
Stage 1 NREM. This only lasts a few minutes—it’s kind of like the bridge between waking and sleeping. If you’re woken, you’re unlikely to even remember you were asleep.
Stage 2 NREM. A bit deeper than stage 1 NREM, but you can still be woken up with a bit of effort. Most people spend about half of the night in this stage.
Stage 3 NREM. Deep, deep sleep. You know when you’re woken up and you feel disoriented and groggy for ages afterwards? That’s stage 3 NREM.
Stage 4 REM. The famous one. This is the stage when you dream. Most of your body is paralysed (to make sure you don’t act out your dreams too much), but your eye muscles are still able to move (hence the name). Heart-rate, breathing, brain activity, and other biomarkers can all rise, almost to levels as if you were awake.
So what counts as healthy sleep? It’s not entirely straightforward, but a lot of the most restorative processes will take place in stage 3 NREM—deep sleep. Really though, it’s about balance. Getting the right mix of stages over the course of the night. And if you aren’t even sure where to start, start here.
