Whether you suffer from chronic or acute pain caused by a recent injury or accident, discomfort is another potential cause of maintenance insomnia. This forces you to remain in the earlier stages of sleep where disruption is much more common.įrequently waking up and worrying over the inability to fall back to sleep can increase your stress levels, creating a vicious cycle of waking and struggling to go back to sleep. When your brain and body are alert and energized, it’s more difficult for you to enter into deep, restorative sleep. Stress not only makes it difficult to fall asleep but can wake you up multiple times throughout the night. All of which make it impossible to fall asleep. Your heart rate and breathing increase and you may experience alertness and racing thoughts. When you’re stressed, your body experiences the “flight or fight” response. Stress is one of the leading causes of all types of insomnia - maintenance insomnia included. It’s in the earlier stages of sleep when you’re not yet fully relaxed, that maintenance insomnia strikes. On average, you’ll go through this cycle up to six times per night. Because of the lack of muscle movement during this stage of sleep, it’s often difficult to wake or disturb someone during REM sleep.Įach of the 4 sleep stages are what makes up your natural sleep cycle. Most people enter the REM stage of sleep after 90 minutes and remain there for most of the second half of the night. While your brain activity is heightened at this stage, your muscles are in a state of paralysis, with two significant exceptions - the muscles that control breathing and your eyes (hence the name). This is when most people experience vivid dreams and strengthen both memory and creativity. The REM (or rapid eye movement) stage of sleep is when your brain is most active. REM sleep is the last stage of the sleep cycle and the one most people are familiar with. For many people, the first half of the night is spent in the deep sleep stage. It’s during this stage that your body experiences recovery and growth. During stage 3, your muscles relax even more and your breathing and heart rate slow. As the name suggests, it’s more difficult to wake someone once they enter this stage of the sleep cycle. Stage 3 sleep is also referred to as deep sleep. Short bursts of brain activity make you less susceptible to being woken by external factors during this stage in the sleep cycle. Your muscles begin to relax, your heart and breathing rates slow down, and your body temperature lowers. Stage 2 of NREM sleep lasts between 10 and 30 minutes and happens as your body enters a more subdued state. Without disruption, most people move quickly from stage 1 to stage 2. Because you’re not fully asleep, it’s quite easy to wake during the stage 1 NREM cycle. During this stage, your body is just starting to relax and brain activity is slowing down. Stage 1 generally lasts for between 1 and 5 minutes and is described as the time it takes you to “doze off”. The higher the stage of NREM sleep you’re in, the harder it is to wake up. NREM stands for “non-REM” sleep and most people experience 3 of these cycles per night, ranging in duration from 5 minutes up to 60 minutes. Your natural sleep cycle consists of four stages including 3 NREM cycles and one REM cycle. Natural Sleep CyclesĪs you progress through the different stages of sleep, you’re more likely to wake during some than others. During this time, a number of factors (both physical and mental) can cause you to wake up and make it impossible to fall back to sleep. Unfortunately, some people still struggle to sleep for one, long period of time. With the invention of electricity, people naturally extended their wake hours much later into the night and consolidated sleep into one long stretch (or bout). Because of this, there’s a disconnect between darkness and how much sleep people need. This meant they were sleeping for between 12 and 15 hours a night! That’s nearly 6 hours longer than the 7 to 9 hours recommended for adults. Before electricity, people would fall asleep after sunset and stay asleep until sunrise. In the 17th century, historian Roger Ekirch explained that people sleep in two bouts and experience a period of wakefulness in the middle of the night. One doctor, however, credits historical evidence as an explanation for why we naturally wake up during the night.
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