this might help make sense of things, wake up during a REM stage, you feel better, wake up during stage 4, you feel half asleep.
These sleeping cycles get shorter as you increase in age, and elderly get little REM and stage 4 sleep (so they dont physically and mentally recoup as well during sleep).
I get up earlier and earlier as I get older, but I have found it isnt really the number of hours, its where in your sleep pattern you wake up...sleep occurs in waves, you are contantly going in out of deep sleep, if you try to wake up when you are in the middle of a deep sleep mode, you feel like ass and dont want to get up, but if you can figure out when you come out of the deep sleep and you wake up when you are in a period of light sleep, you will feel refreshed. How you find it I have no idea. They say Davinci never slept, he would nap only to the point of deep sleep and then wake up...he would hold an object and right when he entered deep sleep, his muscles would relax and he wouldnt be able to hold the object, it would drop and the noise would wake him up and he would continue on with his work...however I dont know how true that is.
I can believe that. I have insomnia that I don't treat with medication. On most nights I'll get a 2-4 hour nap if i'm lucky. Any longer and I wake up with a huge headache, and feeling like complete shit. Though I'm always trying to force myself to sleep longer, because everyone tells me it's unhealthy. I've been this way since the 3rd or 4th grade. I'm content with it now, and I watch alot of infomercials.
this might help make sense of things, wake up during a REM stage, you feel better, wake up during stage 4, you feel half asleep.
These sleeping cycles get shorter as you increase in age, and elderly get little REM and stage 4 sleep (so they dont physically and mentally recoup as well during sleep).
yeah this is a good diagram.
basically sleep is broken down into four stages and you go through them sequentially and then in reverse order, but instead of going back to one you hit rem sleep which is typically where dreaming occurs, although there have been reports of dreams occurring in other stages.
also it's typical that people sleep less when they get older. a lot of old people actually (like my dad) have completely wacked out sleep schedules, like going to bed at 9 pm and waking up at 3 am.
personally i like to get 7.5 to 8.5. anything below 5 and i'm not feeling too good.
I'm all for 10-11 hours a night but tend to survive on 5-6 due to not wanting to sacrifice my evenings while having to get up way too early for my job.
I have a strong believe that if i got a good night's sleep on a regular basis I'd be a far more successful member of society.
Comments
this might help make sense of things, wake up during a REM stage, you feel better, wake up during stage 4, you feel half asleep.
These sleeping cycles get shorter as you increase in age, and elderly get little REM and stage 4 sleep (so they dont physically and mentally recoup as well during sleep).
I can believe that. I have insomnia that I don't treat with medication. On most nights I'll get a 2-4 hour nap if i'm lucky. Any longer and I wake up with a huge headache, and feeling like complete shit. Though I'm always trying to force myself to sleep longer, because everyone tells me it's unhealthy. I've been this way since the 3rd or 4th grade. I'm content with it now, and I watch alot of infomercials.
- spidey
yeah this is a good diagram.
basically sleep is broken down into four stages and you go through them sequentially and then in reverse order, but instead of going back to one you hit rem sleep which is typically where dreaming occurs, although there have been reports of dreams occurring in other stages.
also it's typical that people sleep less when they get older. a lot of old people actually (like my dad) have completely wacked out sleep schedules, like going to bed at 9 pm and waking up at 3 am.
personally i like to get 7.5 to 8.5. anything below 5 and i'm not feeling too good.
I could have written this myself.
Hm, okay well. This 90 minute interval thing isn't working for me.. More experimentation later.
- spidey