Sleep cylces

I've been reading up a bit on sleep cycles and from what I understand a cycle will last around 90 min and the "best quality" sleep is stage 4 (deep sleep) and REM. The "quality" also decreases the longer you sleep. In the diagrams i've been looking at it seems that you only get deep sleep during the first two cycles. So wouldn't the optimal sleep pattern be 2 sessions of 3~ hours? How long do you have to be awake between them for it to "reset"? (since the brief awakenings you have during the night doesn't seem to affect them)

Good Question lainon, I have personally followed a 3/6 pattern where I try to get as close to 6 hours of sleep and I find myself waking around 3 hours after I go to sleep (for me this means lying there with my eyes closed, or sometimes I look around briefly for what feels like 5 minutes). There are some people who have mastered the 4 hour sleep schedule, but that usually creates long term issues. Look at what is occurring during the REM cycle, and think of the pre and post periods as brain priming for high data transfer. 3 hours may not be enough, but setting aside 6 hours to sleep +-15 minutes is probably the best thing for you

>>1734 Thanks for the reply. I'm currently in the process of un-fuarrrking my life and have 7 hours set aside for sleeping. It usually takes a bit of time until a fall asleep (varies) and I always wake up a bit before the alarm, so i'm getting about 6 hours of sleep every night (4 cycles I guess) and feel decent, but a bit tired throughout the day. If I stay awake and don't nap i'll fall asleep easily which is great since i've always struggled falling asleep (would usually lie about 2 hrs on avg). How do you manage to wake up after 3 hours? Did you set an alarm in the beginning? What I want essentially is higher quality sleep but to also fall asleep easily in the night. How the fuarrrk do people survive on 4 hours? It must be polyphasic then. I actually tried polyphasic years ago. It worked, but I felt like soykaf since I was probably pretty sleep deprived. I think it's completely pointless for a normal life.

>>1737 I actually used to do my laundry at odd hours because the apartments laundry room was always full at night, so I set my alarm for 3 in the morning (went to bed at 23:30-24:00... not really intentional) I recall hearing this, which supposedly has a 96% success rate in putting people to sleep if you practice. I did something similar by just focusing on the sound of my breathing, and slowing it down until I go to sleep. >How to fall asleep in two minutes >1. Breathe slowly and deeply, relaxing the muscles in your face. Release any tension in your forehead, jaw, and around your eyes. >2. Relax your body. Start with your shoulders, dropping them as low as possible. Then loosen your upper and lower arm on one side and then the other. >3. While breathing in deeply and exhaling slowly, relax your upper body and then release any tension in your legs, from your thighs to your lower legs. >4. After your entire body has been relaxed for 10 seconds, you have to clear your mind. This can be done by doing one of the following: >Imagine yourself lying in a canoe on a serene lake with blue sky above you. >Picture yourself all cosy and warm in a black velvet hammock in a pitch-black room. >Say 'don't think, don't think, don't think' over and over again for 10 seconds. >Once you are physically relaxed and your mind is empty for at least 10 seconds, you’ll fall asleep. if you notice yourself stirring, try to go back to sleep until the end of your cycle as your aware state might be part of the beginning or end of a cycle, not actually being awake (45 or 75 minutes) so go back to sleep until you hit 90

>>1737 forgot to add, stop using electronics ~30 minutes before bed, or use blue blocking goggles or screen covers if you do (you can buy 3M brand yellow or orange safety glasses for cheap) becasue screens put off blue light, and a harvard stuy showed that blue light causes >hunger for junk food by stimulating specific hormones >being awake and alert (because millions of years of the sun coming up and the sky being blue probably coincided with human behavioral evolution) >shifted sleep cycles (offsets cycle timelines in the day)

>>1739 To add to this, use something to reduce blue light on you screen when you use it in the night. For Linux there's gammastep or redshift (depends on your distro), for Windows everyone use f.lux.

>>1733 I think you're confused, lainon. REM sleep, which isn't much like any numbered phase but fits in stage 1 better than the others, is the primary factor in restfulness; deep sleep is only necessary because humans don't seem capable of staying in REM sleep for long without enough deep sleep. Therefore, since more time asleep gives more REM sleep, sleep quality *increases* the longer the sleep process is uninterripted. The opposite is also true: experiments where subjects are allowed deep sleep but awoken whenever they enter REM leave them almost as exhausted the next day as subjects who were kept awake all night. (Note, though: as you can see in picrel, it's natural for people to momentarily awake during "uninterrupted" sleep. If they aren't made alert and are allowed to quickly fall back asleep they won't fall out of their sleep progress and won't remember waking up if asked the next morning.) All of this only applies to the traditional 10hrs in bed / 14 hrs on feet monophasic sleep schedule, though. I'm not aware if the polyphasic sleep schedules some try out have been widely studied enough to know how the sleep process changes. I'd assume it'd have to for users to get enough REM to be physically able to maintain it, but doing a whole-electrode test of potentially multiple days of several lie-downs a day sounds like the mother of all obnoxious research projects.