Sleep cycle

I was

talking about Mike's sleep cycles.

We had a booze news.

Jeff told us about a Ren Fair.

It's about having like these proportions in your body gradually, you know, transitioning through these different cycles of sleep through the night.

And that the only way for that to happen is being consistent because when your brain goes into these different sleep cycles is determined by your normal circadian rhythm, like your normal time that you go to bed and wake up.

And so what happens is when you If you go to bed late, you miss out on the normal sleep cycles in the first half of the night, which is like your deep sleep.

That's where your brain flushes all these five products produced throughout the day.

You regenerate your actual body tissues.

And then if you wake up super early, now you're missing majority of your REM sleep.

And so no matter how you hack it, you're missing a different type of sleep because if you, if you, stay up later, you don't start at stage one.

You don't gradually go into the same sleep cycles.

I think it's very important, the idea of the cycles that are going.

Can you explain to us the notion of the sleep cycles? And I think the problem is most of us are not in the right cycle to get good quality sleep for most of the night, is it?

Well, in a way, I would say that...

Or the right part of the cycle.

If you're sleeping what appears to be enough hours but you're still waking up feeling exhausted or groggy, it's usually a quality problem, right, not a quantity issue.

So this could mean you're waking up when you might not even realize it, so you're not getting those complete sleep cycles we discussed.

It's also possible that if you're experiencing that on a regular basis, that you could have an undiagnosed sleep disorder like sleep apnea.

So if this happens to you routinely, I would consider having a sleep test or a sleep evaluation performed to figure out what is going on.

Another common issue that can cause sleep disruption is thyroid conditions.

So hypothyroidism is a big one.

It is associated with daytime sleepiness, obstructive sleep apnea, which I just mentioned, and poor sleep quality and architecture overall, meaning you may not be getting those complete sleep cycles with all of the stages that you need for optimal recovery.

Now, the proposed mechanism behind this is that TSH is directly connected to our circadian rhythm regulation, and TSH is thyroid-stimulating hormone.

Right.

Because you're going through multiple, usually, depending on how many hours of sleep you get, most people get four or five sleep cycles in a night.

And so your dream state is your lightest stage of sleep.

So a lot of the times, that's how come when you wake up, you might remember a dream immediately because your body will... will go through that and then it goes from the dream into the light stage and then the deep sleep where you're basically paralyzed and you can't move at all and then it cycles back up and then back down again which is why your heart rate kind of goes through different things in the evening so again but a lot of the time in the morning if you wake up like that then your body has completed a sleep cycle and says okay we're good you got what you needed now it's time to rise

It's a little thing.

The Sleep Cycle app is only like 99 cents a year, and it has truly changed my life, which sounds like a live read, and I understand that, but it's not.

because when the phone feels you moving, it knows you're not in REM sleep, and so I awake in this half-hour window, and it's set between 5.15 and 5.45, about half the time I get up before then anyway, and then I just start sending Jackson TikToks that he uses as audio.

Does that drive you up the wall? No.

You might find yourself thinking, what if this happens again? Sorry, you can hear my dog moving in the background.

Why am I still feeling this way? Am I recovering normally? What will my future look like? What if I don't sleep tonight? Unfortunately, worrying about sleep often creates even more difficulty sleeping and this can lead to what sleep specialists sometimes call the anxiety sleep cycle.

Anxiety causes poor sleep, poor sleep increases anxiety, increased anxiety makes sleep harder and it can quickly become a frustrating loop.

But why does anxiety often feel worse at night? Many people recovering from a cardiac event tell me that their anxiety seems to come alive at bedtime.

And why can't I switch off? Can actually increase alertness and make sleep harder to achieve.

The more pressure we put on ourselves to sleep, the more elusive it often becomes.

I mentioned the anxiety sleep cycle and unfortunately anxiety and poor sleep, as I've said, can feed off each other.

The anxiety makes it harder to fall asleep or stay asleep.

Each cycle is a journey, a descent into stillness and a return into dream.

You go through about five sleep cycles each night.

On an average night, most people complete about five full sleep cycles.

That means five descents into the depths of slow wave sleep, and five ascents into the vivid theaters of REM.

Each cycle is unique, with dreams becoming longer and stranger toward morning, and deep sleep receding as dawn approaches.

Nightmares, on the other hand, represent emotional processing gone awry.

When REM is disrupted by trauma, stress, sleep deprivation, or irregular sleep cycles, the brain struggles to complete its emotional work.

The amygdala fires intensely while the calming effects of REM are impaired, leading to dreams

filled with fear.

Every night, while you lie still in the dark, your brain performs a quiet choreography more intricate than any concert, more precise than any clock.

This choreography is the sleep cycle, a repeating sequence that carries you through shallow rest, deep restoration, vivid dreaming, and back again.

If dreams are the stories your brain tells in the dark, then sleep cycles are the stages on which those stories unfold.

Most people imagine sleep as a steady descent into unconsciousness, but biology tells a richer tale.