Sleep and wakefulness are intricately linked to each other, with the quality of a person’s sleep having a massive impact on their productivity during periods of unconsciousness. While getting an adequate amount of sleep is vital, getting good quality sleep is paramount. Completing sleep cycles and oscillating through different sleep stages smoothly affords a person good quality sleep, with interruptions that interfere with the transition between stages and the cycles they comprise diminishing sleep quality (Saper, 2013). A typical night’s sleep cycle consists of four stages. However, the sleep cycle is divisible into two parts, rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM sleep. The non-REM stage is further divided into three stages which are the stage1 or N1, stage 2 or N2, and stage 3 or N3.

All the different sleep stages have distinct properties that distinguish them from each other. The N1 stage lasts between 1 and 5 minutes, and encephalographic readings display beta waves as the individual begin to doze off. People are easier to rouse from sleep in this stage, and their bodies might twitch (Saper, 2013). In the N2 stage, brain activity displays slower alpha waves, body temperature, breathing rates, and heart rates drop. People’s body movements almost entirely cease during this stage. This stage may last anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes. Delta waves dominate the N3 stage, which may last between 20 and 40 minutes. Although dreams occur in all stages of sleep, they occur in high frequency and intensity. Vivid or lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis occur most frequently in the REM stage, whose duration is highly variable and may last 10 to 60 minutes (Patel, Reddy, and Araujo, 2020).

Sleep disorders can be disabling for some people, but most individuals suffering from anyone may display subtle signs and symptoms of either mental or physical illness, because of sleep’s role in cognitive development and long-term memory processing, people with sleep disorders such as insomnia or who undergo some other sort of sleep deprivation. Furthermore, their learning ability is also less powerful Alhola and Polo-Kantola (2007) reported that sleep deprivation induced cognitive function impairment and which in turn impairs learning by making it harder for people to translate new information into behavioral responses. Physical impacts of sleep deprivation may manifest as daytime somnolence, weight gain. Sleep deprivation has also been linked to an increased risk of developing certain severe health conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and kidney disease (Bandyopadhay and Sigua, 2019). People should strive to improve their sleep duration and quality without neglecting either property of their sleep. Some positive moves people can take include making sleep a priority every day with at between 7 and 9 hours for adults, adopting good sleep patterns, and talking to a healthcare provider.

References

Alhola, P., & Polo-Kantola, P. (2007). Sleep deprivation: Impact on cognitive performance.

Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, 3(5), 553–567. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19300585

Bandyopadhyay, A., & Sigua, N. L. (2019). What Is Sleep Deprivation?

American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 199(6), P11–P12. https://doi.org/10.1164/rccm.1996p11

Patel, A. K., Reddy, V., & Araujo, J. F. (2020). Physiology, sleep stages. StatPearls [Internet].

Saper, C. B. (2013). The neurobiology of sleep. CONTINUUM: Lifelong Learning in Neurology, 19(1), 19-31.