Interestingly, deep sleep lasts for longer periods in the first half of the night and becomes shorter with each sleep cycle.īut here’s the clincher: you can’t reach deep sleep without moving through the other levels of sleep first, so this is why experts recommend at least seven uninterrupted hours of slumber per night. How long does deep sleep last and why does it matter?Ī complete sleep cycle takes 90 to 110 minutes on average and deep sleep (stage three and four) lasts between 20 to 40 minutes. REM sleep is also thought to be important for learning and creating new memories. Your muscles are paralysed so you don’t act out your dreams, while your heart rate increases (it’s pumping more blood to your brain and less to the body) and eyes move rapidly behind your eyelids. This is where your brain activity is akin to wakefulness and you’ll do most of your dreaming. Things get even more interesting in stage five, REM sleep. As a result, deep sleep is the sleep you need to feel refreshed in the morning. Brain waves become the slowest they’ll be and this is when the body’s growth and repair processes happen. The magic happens during stages three and four as you slip into proper deep sleep, also known as delta or slow-wave sleep. You become even more relaxed, your core body temperature drops and your heart rate and brain waves slow. In stage two, you begin to sink into a deeper sleep. Your mind relaxes, your breathing slows, and your muscles sometimes twitch but you can be woken easily. In stage one of NREM, your body is transitioning between its waking state and sleeping state. When we drift off, our body will go through four stages of NREM and one of REM sleep.
Sleep moves in cycles across two phases: non rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. What is deep sleep?ĭeep sleep is the stage of sleep with the slowest brain waves, but to understand it, we need to wrap our heads around how sleep works. These tips will help you understand and maximise deep sleep, so you can kiss goodbye days of rolling into work on five hours’ sleep wearing half a kilo of concealer and cradling a double flat white. It’s the key to functioning like a boss human. We’re living in a world that constantly competes for our attention, inevitably leaking into our evenings and robbing us of precious slumber.ĭeep sleep is what refreshes the brain and repairs the body, so if you’re someone who doesn’t sleep enough or gets eight hours and still wakes up tired, you’re probably lacking this particular phase of shut eye. If you were a house, deep sleep would be the concrete slab – the foundation that everything is built on.Įxperts tell us that we’re supposed to clock between seven to nine hours of sleep a night, but we know that’s easier said than done. Sleep is often seen as a luxury, but it’s actually one the most fundamental parts of being a healthy, well-functioning human.
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