How I improved my energy levels by calculating the sleep cycles.
Recently, I made a research, basically on the Internet, about the sleep cycles. Sleep is a very important and necessary process of the brain. Sleep restores our energy, clears mental fatigue and speed up healing. Nearly all people sleep at night while they wake up in the morning. Though, sometimes instead of waking up feeling completely refreshed and full of energy, we feel more tired than before going to bed. People, who are forced to wake up early in the morning, may have experienced this sluggishness more often. This situation of waking up tired happened also to me many times. If I wake up tired then in most cases my day is ruined. I am bored all the time, I cannot think clearly and I feel sleepy. In general I feel terrible. Well, let’s see why this happens. It was believed that getting not enough sleep is the main cause of feeling tired after waking up. If you sleep for a short time, less than 5 hours, then it is natural to feel sluggish the next day. But, I have observed that sometimes even with lesser sleep I wake up more energized. Well, the reason is the sleep cycles. Sleep is a procedure where the brain organizes and completes vital tasks. This procedure is divided into cycles. Each sleep cycle consist of five sleep stages. These are the following:
• Stage 1 – Sleepiness • Stage 2 – Light Sleep • Stage 3 & 4 – Deep sleep • REM – Rapid Eye Movement (dreaming state)
I will not analyze here the theory about sleep cycles; there is plenty of good information on the topic from other related websites so there is no need to write the same things. Typically you can check Wikipedia for more information on sleep http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep#Stages_of_sleep. A sleep cycle lasts 90 minutes on average. After a sleep cycle you enter REM. Well, there is a lot of research and experimentation on what’s the ideal amount of sleep one may get in order to feel energized upon waking. I found refuted opinions on this matter, so I don’t really know which or whether any of these beliefs is correct. I can only tell you what works for me. I have observed that I have the greatest difficulty to wake up in two cases; when I dream and when I am at the deep sleep stage. If the alarm clock rings and I am in the middle of a dream then I feel very groggy, disoriented and tired. It is like I never slept. But if the alarm clock rings when I am not in REM stage then I can get up easily and quickly. The second case happens when I do not sleep enough (less than 5 hours). Well, according to the above observations what is best for me is to sleep as many hours as I can, provided that the total amount is multiples of 90 minutes. So, according to how many hours I have available each night, I sleep 3, 4:30, 6, 7:30 or 9 hours. If I sleep less than 7:30 hours then I usually take a 20-30 min power nap on evening just after work. My energy levels are very high when I follow this sleep schedule. The difficult thing is to accurately calculate the time. You may fall on bed but not sleep quickly. This delays your sleep cycles and ruins your schedule. Many times I went to bed but had trouble to sleep. And the next day I had to wake up in the middle of a nice dream… It would be better for me to wake up earlier and prevent entering the REM state, than to wake up in the middle of it. Of course the best thing it would be to wake up just after the REM. There are some products that can calculate what the best time for you to wake up is. I have tried none of them yet and that’s why I am not affiliated with these products. Though, I have ordered WakeMate and I still wait for it to arrive. I will let you know if it works. For reference reasons only, there are also some other products you can check. I list them below: • Sleep cycle alarm clock for iphone You can try to find out what’s your sleep cycles’ duration and adapt your total sleeping time according to them. I cannot guarantee that you will see results but you don’t lose anything for trying. The difficult part is to be accurate with the time. If you can do this then you may enjoy high performance and energy nearly every day.
Return from "sleep cycles" to "the human mind" OR Return to Mind Expanding Techniques
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