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| Sleep Stages |
When people need extra time to keep up with the demands of everyday life the only answer seems to be cutting back on sleep. When you understand sleep you’ll find out that this answer could be very damaging to your health. You need a healthy sleep-wake cycle.
How much sleep do we need and how many hours we actually sleep? A lot of people sleep only about 6 hours a night. An adult needs about 7.5-9 hours to completely restore physical and mental energy.
There are two types of sleep, REM (Rapid Eye Movement) and non-REM sleep. Non-REM sleep has 4 different stages going from transition sleep to deep sleep. Non-REM sleep restores your physical energy, REM sleep restores your mental energy. During the night your sleep goes back and forth between REM and non-REM sleep. One cycle last about 90 minutes. If you don’t get enough sleep you have to pay the price with REM sleep since the body wants to restore physical energy first.
What happens if we don’t get enough sleep? We don’t have enough energy throughout the day and we probably forget how it does feel to feel good. But there are other more serious effects too:
- Fatigue, lack of motivation
- Moodiness
- Inability to cope with stress
- Concentration, memory problems
- Weight gain
- Increased risk of diabetes, heart disease and other health problems
With sleeping in on the weekends unfortunately you can’t solve your sleeping problem. You need at least eight hours quality sleep every night.
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