How to Improve Your Sleep and Why it Matters for Your Mental Health: A Look at the Effects of a Lack of Sleep
We can often recognize when someone else has not slept well by observing their physical appearance, energy level, and mood. It is often evident to observe parents of newborns or toddlers who are sleep-deprived. A lack of sleep affects us more than just leaving us tired. When my kids were young, my husband would say, “Naps are wasted on children. They don’t want them but have to have them, and we want them and can’t have them.” Oh, how would we love to have a nap now and then. The National Institute of Health and the National Center on Sleep Disorders agree that we sleep or attempt to sleep for one-third of our lives. That is how crucial sleep is to our health, both physically and mentally. Understanding Sleep To better understand a lack of sleep, we need to understand the stages of sleep. Stage 1: Light sleep. This is a short stage, usually not more than 5% of your total sleep, which begins right after you fall asleep. Stage 2: Deeper sleep. This stage is deeper and makes up about 45% of all the time you spend sleeping (this number goes up as you get older). Research indicates this stage is key in memory storage and learning. Stage 3: Deepest sleep. This stage makes up about 25% of the time you spend sleeping (this number goes down with age). There’s evidence that this stage is the most important for how your body recovers and maintains itself because the brain prioritizes this stage in people with sleep deprivation. It’s quite hard to wake someone up from this stage, and they’ll usually feel foggy or confused for up to thirty minutes after waking up. REM sleep: REM stands for “rapid eye movement.” This stage is when you dream. When a [...]
