Improved
6112 HealthChanged
3785 LivesSaved
3568 Lives0 lives impacted in the last 24 hrs Learn More
Listen as Dr. Brazinsky explains the five stages of sleep.
Dr. Brazinsky:
So basically there are five stages of sleep. Stage 1 sleep is that, “I get into bed, the bed is warm and fuzzy and it’s lovely,” If you’re in that stage or sleep all night you’re going to get up in the morning and not feel rested.
Stage 2 sleep is the first stage of what we call kind of “real sleep” and stage 2 sleep is the sleep when the dog barks or the baby cries, you hear it and you get back, you jump up. It’s a light stage of sleep but it’s a real stage of sleep, but if you’re in that stage of sleep all night, you’re not going to get up feeling well rested.
You want to get into state 3 and stage 4 sleep or “delta sleep.” Those are the, I call it the “pillow drawing stages of sleep.” If you wake up in the morning and there’s a puddle on your pillow, you were in good deep sleep and you had a good night’s sleep, and those stages of sleep are where we’re seeing most sleep apnea, most sleep disorders.
And then the fifth stage of sleep is REM sleep or Rapid Eye Movement sleep and that’s when you dream, and you need to get into those stages of sleep where you dream. One of the things they do when they torture people is they keep them out of REM sleep and we know that if you’re deprived of green stages of sleep that you’ll become fluently psychotic. We don’t know why that is, but we know that that’s an issue.
And so you want to get into those deep stages of sleep and have that nice REM sleep periods throughout the night to have a good night’s sleep.
About Dr. Shari Brazinsky, M.D.:
Dr. Shari Anne Brazinsky is a pulmonary critical care physician at Alvarado Hospital in San Diego, California as a member of the Pulmonary Medicine and Infectious Disease Medical Group. She was named one of San Diego’s 2008 top pulmonary disease doctors for the third time by San Diego Magazine.
Visit Dr. Brazinsky at Alvarado Hospital