Not Sleeping? Are You Maintaining Your Circadian Rhythms?

You have read about REM sleep in my other posts.  What I didn’t talk about was how rapid eye movement sleep follows a circadian rhythm. What this means is that it can depend on the time of night you go to sleep. Because it can take 90 minutes for the first REM cycle to occur, if you go to bed late, you miss the best time for your REM sleep to occur, and your sleep isn’t as good.

Deep sleep on the other hand is dependent on how long you have been awake prior to going to bed, not on the time of night.  The longer you are awake, the longer your deep sleep lasts.  What that means is, in the case of shift work, deep sleep can accommodate itself to the work schedule.  REM sleep, however, is the sleep stage that is responsible for mental and emotional renewal; it can suffer when you go to bed too late.  An old saying, “Sleep before midnight is the best,” seems to be true.

There are morning people and night-owls. Morning people who get up early may even overreact to the rhythm activiation that the morning brings with it.  When the night-owls put off this active phase until the night time hours, it can cause variations in body rhythms.  When morning people sleep late on the weekend, for example, Monday morning tiredness is caused by the lost synchronization.  Keeping sleep habits consistent all seven days of the week is better for your circadian rhythm and provides better, more regular sleep.  We can’t really “catch up” on what we have missed.

These rhythms adjust seasonally as well.  During the summer when there is more light, we tend to sleep less but it doesn’t interfere with our level of physical stamina.  Actually just getting out of bed in the morning in the summer is easier and generally moods are more positive than during the darker days and nights of winter.

Some believe there are other rhythms as well like weekly rhythms and lunar rhythms.  There is a theory that deviating from these normal rhythms can eventually cause disease.  That could, I suppose, define why we do have a higher tendency toward illness when we experience lack of sleep.

Healthy Ideas for Abundant Energy and Better Sleep!