If you get the recommended amount of sleep, seven to nine hours, you are spending ⅓ of your life asleep. Sleep is characterized by three to four stages and deep sleep is the stage needed to make you wake up feeling relaxed.
More people have started using different tablets to help with their sleep quality but a natural way to ensure a better night’s rest is by using products like CBD Canna Oil. One out of three adults don’t get enough sleep, so it’s clear to see how deep sleep has been neglected by tons of people.
Here we will discuss a question that people have been asking for years: ‘How much deep sleep should I get?’ and everything else associated with deep sleep.
How Much Deep Sleep Should You Get?
This is a question that should be on everyone’s mind. Sadly, it doesn’t get talked about enough due to the fact that sleep is neglected by so many people.
Firstly, deep sleep is very important for your brain health. It helps the brain store memories and improves your ability to collect and recall information. So the deepest sleep could help you remember your entire childhood.
As an adult, about 13% – 23% of your sleep should be in deep sleep. If you are getting about eight hours of sleep a night, it would be between 62 to 110 minutes of deep sleep. The older you become, the less deep sleep is needed. So 4 – 5 hours of deep sleep might be a bit overkill.
How to Get More Deep Sleep?
During the deep sleep stage, you feel at your calmest and most relaxed – even though you’re not consciously aware of it. Your heart rate, as well as your breathing is at its lowest, your brain waves slow down, and your eyes and muscles are relaxed. With deep sleep being so important, there are ways to improve it.
- Work out daily – Daily workouts are great for your health and are beneficial for sleep. People who work out normally fall asleep faster. Working out holds tons of benefits for your body, mind, and much more.
- Eat more fiber – Studies show that a good fiber intake can result in more time spent in a deeper sleep.
- Avoid caffeine before bedtime – Everyone knows that caffeine can keep you up at night, as a result, it reduces the time you get to sleep. Having caffeine seven hours prior to bedtime will result in one hour of sleep missed.
- A bedtime routine – After a long and stressful day, this can help you set your mind away from most of your troubling thoughts. If you consistently have a routine before bedtime, your mind will associate it with sleep and set you up for a productive next day.
- Use an eye mask – This works great if the early morning sunrise beams through your window. Eliminating any light that can affect your sleep will help you get a better night’s rest.
What is REM Sleep?
There are stages that your brain moves through while you sleep; one of these stages is REM sleep. Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep is a phase where your eyes move rapidly in various directions. REM sleep occurs several times during sleep, it can occur within the first 90 minutes of sleep. Most dreams occur during this phase and it’s believed to play a role in learning, memory, and a person’s mood.
How Much REM Sleep Do You Need?
On average, during sleep, you will go through three to five REM cycles per night and each episode gets longer than the previous cycle, with the final one lasting an hour. A good goal would be to spend 20 – 25 percent of your time asleep in the REM stage. If you get around seven to eight hours of sleep, about 90 minutes of it should be REM sleep.
REM sleep does decline as you age. As an infant, your REM sleep is greater than 50%, while it slowly declines and gets less as you grow older. As an adult, you only need a 20% minimum of REM sleep.
Too little or too much REM sleep can have a negative effect on your mood, alertness, and ability to focus. It also affects your capacity to take in new information and too much REM can leave you tired the next day. So it is important to get the balance right.
REM Sleep Facts
Other than being a real necessity in sleep, REM also has very interesting facts.
- During REM, your brain is very active and almost as active as when you are awake
- Alcohol before bedtime reduces the amount of REM sleep you have
- If you have REM sleep behavior disorder, you act out your dreams in your sleep
- REM sleep helps consolidate memories.
Deep Sleep vs REM Sleep
Deep sleep and REM sleep are so different that they are literally opposites. Deep sleep as we explained earlier, is the calmest state of sleep where your body and mind enter a relaxed stage that is hard to wake up from. On the other hand, REM sleep is when you are the most active during sleep. So which one is more important?
Deep sleep is actually seen as the most essential stage of sleep. Although both will happen during sleep, and both are essential to a good night’s rest, deep sleep is still more important. The ultimate goal is to wake up relaxed and refreshed the next day and deep sleep is crucial for this reason.
Get a Good Nights Rest
A good seven to nine hours of sleep is typically all we need, or so we thought. The importance of REM and deep sleep is not highlighted enough, and a lot of people are neglecting these two important stages of sleep.
Now that we’ve highlighted the importance of both these sleep stages, we hope you can answer the next time someone asks you ‘how much deep sleep do I need’.
Last updated on October 13th, 2023 at 02:55 pm
