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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 424788" data-attributes="member: 2">Re: Oooo questionGo buy The Complete Idiot's Guide to Sleep by Martin Moore-Ede. Yes, I know the title is insulting, but it's written by one of the best people in the industry, and it's actually quite good.> 1. The body's sleep cycle is governed by some kind of hormone.Not precisely. The sleep cycle is regulated by the body's biological clock, a tiny cluster of cells in your brain. Also known as the suprachiasmatic nucleus (or SCN), this tiny thing controls all of your daily patterns in eating, sleeping, hormone production, etc.  The hormone you're thinking of is melatonin. Melatonin makes you sleepy. Your body makes quite a bit of the stuff at night while you should be sleeping, and much less during the day. Readjusting your sleeping cycle (and thus your biological clock) to a new sleeping cycle gives you the equivalent of jet lag. That's why Monday mornings are so difficult for folks; if you're used to sleeping until 9 am and you suddenly have to get up at 6 am, you find yourself with 3 hours of jetlag, like flying from LA to Boston. Is it any wonder that people are irritable on Monday mornings?  > 3. You also get a mini-increase in the afternoon (around 1ish?) which causes people to want to take a nap. Yup. This is a holdover from prehistoric days, when people would nap in the hot afternoon. Siesta time (about 2 pm, after lunch) is a great time to nap.  The two best types of napos are short (20 minutes) and long (1.5-2 hours.)  Avoid 1 hour naps; they'll leave you more groggy than you were to start with!> 5 Sleep is broken up into R.E.M. cycles (also called dreaming). Not exactly. Sleep is broken into 5 sleep cycles. Stage 1 and 2 are light sleep, easy to wake up from. Stage 3 & 4 are deep sleep, difficult to wake up from (and essential for feeling well rested.) And finally REM sleep, when you dream.In one sleep cycle, you generally pass through each of these stages: 1, 2, 3, 4, then back to 3, 2, 1, then you dream and enter REM sleep. Each sleep cycle takes about 1.5 hours. Thus, in an 8 hour sleeping period, you'll go through roughly 5 sleep cycles.Most of your deep sleep occurs early in the night. Most of your REM sleep occurs near waking.What makes you feel tired is often what stage of the sleep cycle you awaken from. You'll wake up feeling wide awake from a dream or from light sleep, but wake up feeling crappy and groggy from deep sleep.> 6. You need less sleep as you grow older. False, and a common myth. Older people need just as much sleep. But they get less sleep; their body clock begins to break down, and they awake earlier than they used to. That's why many older people rely on naps. The naps make up for the sleep debt they're incurring at night.> Its hard to et good info on the topic.Go get that book I mentioned.  Good stuff.> How did you become a sleep schedualer anyway? Do you have a medical background?Nope, a business background. But I've been doing this for nine years or so, and I've worked with some of the best people in the industry.> What do you think sleep does? > ...  to processing the day's memories for correct archiving into long term memory to helping deal with emotional stressors.I'd agree with this. Meanwhile, your body is rejuvenating itself, healing and resting the muscles.Hope this helped!</blockquote>

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