What Is Sleep? - Keeping It Very Simple

Typically, an average person will spend around 3000 hours a year sleeping and unfortunately, some people have a lot of trouble sleeping and continuously seek out the best sleep aids available to help them. However, you may often ask, “what is sleep and why do we need it”?

So, what is sleep? Our sleep patterns tend to follow a set cycle every time we try to go to sleep; that of REM (rapid eye movement) that is when most dreaming occurs and non-rapid REM. While an average person will spend around 3000 hours a year asleep, unfortunately, a lot of people have trouble sleeping at all and tend to continuously seek out the best sleep aids they can find. An infant spends roughly half their sleep pattern in REM and the other half non-REM while the average adult will spend only 20% of their sleeptime in a REM sleep pattern.

Research has suggested that non-REM sleep consists of four stages prior to reaching REM sleep. Stage one is the time our muscles begin to relax and when we feel half asleep and half awake at the same time. After about ten minutes, we reach Stage two that lasts for around twenty minutes. During this time, we are fully asleep and our heart rate and breathing slows down. While Stage two will last the longest, during Stage three our deep sleep pattern will begin to alter our heart rate and breathing levels to their lowest. Eventually, we reach Stage four where it is more difficult to be woken and if we are, we are often pretty grumpy! All these stages of non-REM typically last up to 90 minutes before REM sleep begins.

During REM sleep and although we are not aware, our brain is particularly active and our eyes move rapidly (hence the term, rapid eye movement). Although your body is resting when you are asleep, your brain is certainly not. Scientists now use expensive equipment to record brain activity and have found that areas of the brain can be very active. The time when we may dream and sleepwalk is when we are in REM sleep. This is also the time our breathing rate and blood pressure begins to rise although the body will not respond to this. It is often suggested that this could be nature’s way of protecting us from harming ourselves when we dream.

As we are all individuals, the amount of sleep we require to function properly differs. As a rule of thumb, if you don’t feel sleepy during the day you are probably getting sufficient sleep. Sadly, many of us either do not get the opportunity for enough sleep or, when the opportunity arises we find we can’t sleep anyway and continuously look for how to get a good nights sleep!

Hopefully this quick what is sleep overview will have been of help to you. If you feel you body has become ‘out of sync’ with your normal sleep patterns, try some of the all natural sleep aids that are available today.