Helge Magnus Heggli`s blog

I was browsing the web when i came across an article about human sleep cycles. I`m the first one to admit that this is an area I do not fully understand. When I have school I sleep 4-5 hours a night, and else i can sleep 10+ hours a night. And still, sometimes I am so tired after 10 hours of sleep, that I can barely get up. Weird, I thought, untill I read this. Now before anyone thinks that I am one to read something and believe it is the truth, I`m going to just say: I googled around, and checked the facts (but if any can prove me wrong here, please go ahead). read more…

Here goes: We humans sleep in 90 minutes sleep cycles, and every night we have 4-5 og these cycles. So when you sleep 7.5 hours, you have completed 5 sleep cycles. And one sleep cycle contains 5 stages (falling asleep, delta sleep, REM sleep etc). The point is: If you complete a sleep cycle you get rested.

A person who completes 4 cycles a night, thus getting 6 hours of sleep is more rested than a person who slept 10 hours but didn`t complete any /some sleep cycles (interrupted by anything/woke up), or woke up during a cycle (but still slept longer).

Im going to put this to the test and try to fall asleep during the next half hour. If I fall asleep 5am (yeah, my internal clock has ben set to “nerd mode” which means sleep to 2pm, and goto bed around 4-5am), I should be able to wake up at 11am, thus getting 4 sleep cycles. Now if I push it further (as you can read following the link further down), I am supposed to be able to get 2 cycles a night (thats 3 hours), and 1 cycle in a nap later tomorrow (thats 1,5 hours again), but that sounds _insane_ as i LOVE to sleep =) It`s just that I have so much to do at the university, so much to do with friends, so many guild-mates whining about MC/ZG and Onyxia in Wow, a village in Black&White 2 who need their god, a lvl10 priest to level up and dont forget, the exercise I should get =)

This guy has some hints on getting by on 4,5 hours of sleep a day.”

Update Monday Morning: They are building something in the apartment over mine, so I woke up around 10:15. That makes 3 complete sleep cycles, and I am pretty awake =) Lets see how long it lasts.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 17th, 2005 at 3:24 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.