What happens after you fall asleep?
4 stages of sleep we all go through every single night
Sleep is a very familiar occurrence. For most of us it happens every single night. And yet we are aware of very little of its functioning. Each and every night, as you say goodnight to our loved ones and part with your electronic devices, you close your eyes and what happens afterwards?
Just how is it that you fall asleep?
Each sleep stage has a unique function and role in maintaining your brain’s overall cognitive performance. We stray further away from the wakeful world; our sleep cycle goes through 4 major stages. The first 3 are part of NREM (Non-Rapid Eye Movement) sleep and the last one is REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep.
Non-Rapid Eye Movement:
S T A G E 1:
This is the transition period from wakefulness to slumber. Wake someone up at this stage and they would claim, they were not asleep at all. But if left unawaken, your body would go through some changes. Your brain gradually slows down and so does your heartbeat, your breathing. Your eye movements slows as well. Your body relaxes with faint and occasional twitching of muscles. At this stage of 5 to 10 minutes, you find yourself slowly but steadily, falling asleep.
S T A G E 2:
At this stage, you are going to spend half of your total sleep time, which is usually about 20 minutes per cycle. Your eye movements have stopped, your body temperature is dropping, you become less aware of your surroundings. Your breathing and your heart rate have become regular, in synch.
The brain also begins to produce bursts of rapid, rhythmic brain wave activity, also known as sleep spindles. They are thought to be a feature of memory consolidation — when your brain gathers, processes, and filters new memories you acquired the previous day. Your body is now preparing for the next two stages where it will repair and restore and reset your brain for the coming day.
S T A G E 3:
Also known as Delta Sleep as our brain lets our deep slow brain waves called delta waves. At this stage your sleep is immune to small outside noises and if you are a heavy sleeper, you may sleep through an apocalypse. Some of you may end up sleepwalking at this stage (a very interesting phenomena we will cover in our next article). This is the first stage of what we call “deep sleep” and failure to reach this stage means next day you will likely be very tired both physically and mentally (Sleep inertia !!).
At this stage your body in physically repairing, preparing you for a very fresh start in the morning. Your brain is consolidating declarative memories like general knowledge, facts, statistics, what homework you did before sleep, your past experiences, etc. Your blood pressure has slowed down, muscles completely relaxed as your brain is also preparing for the next stage, the deepest stage of your sleep cycle.
Rapid Eye Movement:
S T A G E 4:
It starts approximately 90 minutes after the first stage. If you weren’t awakened this whole time, now you have successfully managed to reach the final and the deepest stage of your sleep cycle where your brain is now free to dream. Your brain is aroused with mental activity, and it tries to mostly resemble the activities of your waking hours which your very relaxed and immobilized body of course fails to perform in real life. Your breathing is faster and irregular. Your eyes are rapidly moving under their eyelids. You see yourself in places you have been and never been to, until you wake up.
This is why most of the times when you wake up in the morning, you also wake up from a dream.
The stages do not always happen in the same sequence. If left uninterrupted sometimes one may find repetition of the second stage or delay in the deep stages of sleep. Time spent in each stage changes throughout the night as the cycle keeps repeating. But regardless, it is important to go through all of these stages as they help us to provide our best the next morning. It is the only time, everything within us is truly at peace.
Thank you so much for reading.
