“REM sleep is a paradox because even though it's a stage of sleep, your brain is wide awake,” says Dr. Chhatwal. It's no surprise then that if you wake up in the middle of a REM cycle, you're more likely to remember the dream you were just having.
Multiple studies have shown that lack of slow wave sleep contributes to daytime grogginess and poor mood. Additionally, waking up during REM cycles interrupts our flow of aggregating memory. In order to make sure you wake up during light sleep, try and schedule your sleep in 90-minute multiples.
When you wake up during non-REM sleep, your blood pressure, heart rate and brain activity are slowed down, helping you feel awake and alert much quicker.
These awakenings can be exacerbated by outside factors like noise, artificial light, a partner moving, or other causes. Combating such outside stimulus by creating a cool, dark and quiet bedroom can help minimize these interruptions and figure out how to get more deep sleep.
The majority of REM sleep tends to occur once people have been asleep for a while, meaning it may not occur as often for people with a disrupted sleep schedule. REM rebound often occurs after stress or sleep deprivation, and it happens in both humans and animals.
Numerous studies suggest that increased REM sleep state is the body's recovery response to negative and stressful experiences: “Go to bed because you'll feel better in the morning.” For example, evidence found that victims of motor vehicle accidents who got more REM sleep episodes didn't later have PTSD.
Usually, REM sleep arrives about an hour and a half after you go to sleep. The first REM period lasts about 10 minutes. Each REM stage that follows gets longer and longer. The amount of REM sleep you experience changes as you age.
During REM sleep, your body is relaxed and your muscles don't move. Sleep paralysis occurs when the sleep cycle is shifting between stages. When you wake up suddenly from REM, your brain is awake, but your body is still in REM mode and can't move, causing you to feel like you're paralyzed.
During sleep paralysis you may feel: awake but cannot move, speak or open your eyes. like someone is in your room. like something is pushing you down.
It is most difficult to awaken people from slow-wave sleep; hence it is considered to be the deepest stage of sleep. Following a period of slow-wave sleep, however, EEG recordings show that the stages of sleep reverse to reach a quite different state called rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep.
While all types of sleep appear to be essential, deep wave sleep could be considered the most essential. If your sleep is restless and non-restorative, you may lack sufficient deep sleep. REM sleep assists memory differently than deep sleep, focusing on social-emotional memories and even salvaging forgotten memories.
So does snoring mean deep sleep? No it doesn't. REM sleep becomes very fragmented and interrupted by snoring so snorers aren't able to reach deep sleep. Only frequent, prolonged and severe snores mean possibly obstructive sleep apnea.
For healthy adults, 20-25% of your total time asleep should be REM sleep. That's where the 90-minute number mentioned above comes from. If you sleep for 7-8 hours, 20% of that equates to roughly an hour-and-a-half, or 90 minutes. However, it's worth noting that the amount of REM sleep we need also declines with age.
During REM, our brains process not only new information, but our feelings, too. People who regularly experience broken sleep are crankier, angrier, and more likely to be depressed than those who sleep through the night. In fact, a night of uninterrupted sleep is much worse for your mood than a shorter night's sleep.
For healthy adults, spending 20-25% of your time asleep in the REM stage is a good goal. If you get 7-8 hours of sleep, around 90 minutes of that should be REM.
Hypersomnia is usually indicated by long sleep periods and excessive sleepiness or excessively deep sleep. It may be associated with difficulty in awakening – the person may feel confused or disoriented (sleep drunkenness).
Sexsomnia, characterized by sexual behavior during sleep, is within the spectrum of parasomnias occurring predominantly in NREM sleep, as a variant of confusional arousals and sleepwalking, with or without associated obstructive sleep apnea1.
Non-restorative sleep occurs when you spend enough time resting but you still wake up feeling tired. Many different factors could lead to low-quality sleep. Sometimes non-restorative sleep occurs with other sleep conditions like insomnia, restless leg syndrome, or narcolepsy.
Sleep paralysis occurs when a person's consciousness is awake, but their body is still in a paralyzed sleep state. A person may be unable to speak and feel pressure on their chest, among other symptoms. During sleep paralysis, a person's senses and awareness are active and awake, but their body cannot move.
During REM, the brain is very active, and dreams are at their most intense. But the voluntary muscles of the body — arms, legs, fingers, anything that is under conscious control — are paralyzed.
Sleep paralysis is more common when sleeping on your back, so avoid that position. You can sleep with a pillow behind your back to stop you from rolling over in the night.
Sleeping a lot isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sleep is important. Not getting enough sleep puts you at risk for health problems, from heart disease to obesity to diabetes. However, sleeping a lot all of a sudden when you didn't before might be a reason to look closely at what is going on with your health.
During REM sleep, your eyes move rapidly behind your closed eyes, your heart rate speeds up, and your breathing becomes irregular. In contrast to other stages of sleep, in which your brain waves slow down, your brain is highly active during REM sleep, and your brain waves become more variable.
Experts think morning dreams are easier to remember because they happen during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep, which usually occurs soon before you wake up. During REM sleep, your brain processes your emotions and experiences and organizes them into long-term memories.
After awakening from a nap or a long sleep episode (for example, 7 to 8 hours of sleep at night), people tend to feel groggy from sleep inertia. Sleep inertia is a temporary disorientation and decline in performance and/or mood after awakening from sleep.