Sleep counting, sleeping times, sleep for cure

Try to let your muscles "go," to go limp, to feel yourself sinking into the mattress. Relax mentally. It usually is not possible to let your mind go completely blank, but you can try to find something relaxing to think about. 

Sheep counting, time-honored though it is, does not work for many people. Find something you enjoy imagining-perhaps it is sitting in a boat with a fishing rod, watching the water, waiting for a bite. Leave your worries outside the bedroom. 

This may seem difficult to but there is a bit of basic philosophy which the poet Robert 1100.t wrote about and which all of us could use a philosophy that is most opportune in preparing for bed: 'I've been licked. We all have. I've been thoroughly licked when I didn’t think I could be. It was a terrible blow sometimes. But still, most like that. . . . Anybody with an active mind lives on tentative other than on tenets. You've got to feel a certain pleasure the finality of it.

 Every general who goes into lie which he had more information before he goes in. But each is on insufficient information." Of course, you have probably you won't solve them by stewing over them in bed. If vow to keep problems out of the bedroom and they still intrude.

Try amusing reading

If that doesn't help, pick something you feel you have a duty, but no great desire, to read and go at it for a few minutes; the boredom may help. Have a pad and pencil handy, and if you get ideas you think are important, jot them down so you can forget them for the night. Don't try to force yourself to sleep. Don't approach the bed with grim determination. 

Remember that lying quietly in bed for several hours, even if sleep does not come, is restful; and very often sleep will come. If you don't get to sleep and lying quietly disturbs you, begin again by reading for a while or listening to soothing music. 

Stages of sleep and good health and research

 It is quite normal now for a sudden body spasm to on, perhaps awakening you for a fraction of a second. And then you move into stage 1 sleep; voltage from your brain is small, changing rapidly pulse is slowing, muscles relax. You enter stage 2 sleep as brain waves rapidly grow larger. If at this point you were to be awakened, you might well believe you had not been, sleep at all, though you have been for about 10 minutes. In about half an hour, you are in stage 3 sleep.

 Brain wave voltage is higher, the waves slower. You are breathing evenly, muscles relaxed, with temperature and blood pressure still falling. It would take a loud noise now to wake you. Soon you move into stage 4 sleep, with large slow brain waves. This is the very deep sleep that most people may think of as real sleep, but it is only a small fraction of the total.

After about 20 minutes of stage 4 sleeps, you start to move upward into lighter sleep. Now you may turn in bed or make some other movement; you are almost at the consciousness level. But instead of waking, your eyes move under closed lids, much as if you were watching a movie. Your heartbeat is now irregular and your blood pressure fluctuates. You are dreaming and if awakened at this point you can describe the dream in detail-but if you are not awakened then, you may or may not remember the dream in the morning. After about 10 minutes of REM or dream sleep, the cycle starts again. 

This, then, is the sleep process. There are still many unknowns. For example, there is no clear answer to the natural question: which sleep is better, deep or light? Nature apparently considers both necessary and oscillates between them. Also, there has long been a theory that sleep is needed in order to allow the body to get rid of "fatigue toxins." The idea is that during an active day, with constant contraction of muscles, certain chemicals are produced which are disposed of as waste.

But during activity the disposal rate is not sufficient to prevent some buildup of the materials and fatigue results. It has been thought, therefore, that as this fatigue linked 10 undisposed wastes builds up, sleep results. Yet, if this were the case, "toxins" should disappear during the night and we should leap out of in a state of exuberance in the morning. But this rarely happens. In .my case, with or without adequate explanations of why, we do adequate sleep is necessary. 

Without it, not only do we feel fatigued; we also feel emotionally drained, which Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington have demonstrated that the longest a person can go without sleep is about 240 hours, or 10 days. And volunteers who went through the experience found it much like torture. Even after 65 hours of sleeplessness, one volunteer was discovered in a washroom, frantically trying to wash "cobwebs" from his face, believing he was covered with them. Sleep is needed for emotional stability as well as physical refreshment. 

Sleep and research- EEG effects and benefits of sleep

Based upon distinct changes in the EEG and upon another phenomenon-the appearance of rapid eye movements (REM) at some points -sleep investigators divide sleep into a series of stages: In stage 1, light sleep begins. There are slow EEG waves, 4 to 6 cycles a second. In stage 2, medium deep sleep, slower waves appear and voltage increases. In stage 3, deeper sleep, voltage increases still more. And in stage 4, deepest sleep, very large slow waves of high voltage appear on the EEG. But when deepest sleep is reached, it is not maintained long.

Instead, there is a return to stage 1 sleep. And with the return to stage 1, REM or rapid eye movements appear. And the progression through the various stages occurs about every 90 minutes. Thus, however much you may think so upon full awakening in the morning, you never sleep through a night "like a log." In fact, many changes take place. There are muscle movements at various stages of sleep, less often during stage 1, quite often during moving from one stage to another. Actually, in stage 1, the heart beats faster, breathing quickens, muscles tend to relax, as if, some investigators suggest, you were settling down to dream much as you would settle down in your seat before the curtain goes up in the theater. It is in stage 1, with the appearance of REM that you dream. And you dream whether you remember the dreaming or not.

Investigators, after many thousands of studies, know enough to realize that, for whatever reason dreams are needed, all people dream just as all people sleep, and the dreams are not haphazard but appear at regular times in the sleeping cycle. The need for dreaming has been demonstrated by investigators who have awakened subjects from sleep every time REM began, depriving them of their dreaming periods, allowing them to sleep at other times. The result: impaired functioning, physical and psycho- logical.

The EEG has established that some of the older ideas of sleep, such as the popular notion that sleep is always deepest and soundest at the beginning of the night and lightest in the morning near awakening time, are false.  Work in the sleep laboratory, you can reconstruct what happens a night's sleep in this fashion: As you relax and close your eyes, pulse is steady and even, your body temperature gradually to [all, and your brain waves show an even frequency of about  second, called alpha rhythm. You are awake but relaxed, to move into sleep.

Sleep and Good health - Sleeping Pattern and Sleeping process

SLEEP

SLEEP IS fundamental to good health and yet, it would appear, many of us need a refresher course in sleeping. According to recent surveys, about half of all men and women in the United States have trouble sleeping at night, and about one fourth of the population use some form of sleeping medicine. Before considering how sound, healthy sleep may best be encouraged, let's get some basic understanding of this long-mysterious process which has come in for scientific exploration only in recent years.

How much sleep do you need? Have you ever really tested yourself over a period of time?

What is the nature of sleep?

Are sleeping patterns inborn or acquired habits?

What happens in sleep?

THE SLEEP PROCESS

As you have discovered when you do not get adequate sleep, sleep is necessary for both physical and psychological well-being. Even now, however, scientists are unable to explain why about one third of our lives must be spent in sleep and why in our sleep we dream. In trying to get sound insights into the mysteries of sleep, investigators in many sleep laboratories use volunteers to whose scalp they tape electrodes to detect tiny currents in the brain.

 Amplified many hundreds of thousands of times, the impulses are registered on graph paper as an electroencephalogram (EEG).

 In addition, equipment records pulse, eye movements, breathing, body movements, and muscle tensions while the in sleep, it is now known, is not a state of oblivion, of complete.

Rather, it is a progression of rhythmic cycles.  Equipment, scientists have been able to establish that sleep. That a newborn baby alternates between sleep and wakefulness at about hourly intervals; that gradually, as the child grows older, the cycles stretch out until eventually they becomes 90-minute cycles in adulthood.

 These 90-minute cycles are beyond conscious control. It used to be thought that we fall into deeper and deeper sleep during the night until we arrive at a turning point, and then sleep lightens progressively until we wake up. But it is now clear that this is not so. Instead, throughout the night, we shift from one gradation of sleep to another and are even awake several times during the night without necessarily remembering the wakefulness.