Sleep stages

There are five total stages of sleep and they are numbered to make it easy to remember—1, 2, 3, 4 and REM. Basically you move from light sleep (stage 1 & 2) to deep sleep (3 & 4) and then to REM sleep. REM sleep stands for Rapid Eye Movement and is the stage of sleep where dreaming takes place. It is also considered to be deep restorative sleep and it is difficult to wake someone when they are int his stage of sleep.

Moving through all these stages is considered one cycle of sleep and it takes  on average between 90 to 110 minutes. Each night you will go through about 4 or 5 sleep cycles.  

DID YOU KNOW? REM sleep stimulates the areas in the brain used in learning. This is why infants spend most of their time in REM sleep.


You need to move through all these cycles to obtain a proper night’s sleep, so for teens that means getting 8 to 10 hours of sleep. Often people believe that they can “make up” for sleep on the weekends when they didn’t get enough sleep during the week. However, this is not really accurate because you can’t “make up” for the interruption to your sleep cycles. The rhythm—moving through all sleep cycles completely—is very important to proper brain functioning during the day and proper encoding of the day’s events.  Say what?  Read on to the next post to get the skinny on that….

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