Written by Lyz Cooper, Therapeutic Music Advisor at Zepp Aura
Every night we go through different stages of sleep. In this article, we will discuss these different stages explore how your Zepp wearable device and the Zepp App provides you with valuable insight into these stages and your overall quality of sleep. We will also discover the important role that Zepp Aura AI Sleep Melodies play in helping you to improve your sleep.
The stages of sleep cycle repeatedly throughout the night. Each stage of sleep can be fairly brief, lasting only a few minutes, totalling between 90–200 minutes each night. If you refer to your Zepp wearable and the supporting App, you will be able to see these different stages of your sleep and how long you have achieved each stage for. You could also use the Zepp Aura every night for 7 nights and monitor the quality of your sleep over this period to see how the music is making a difference.
The first stage of sleep occurs when you first begin to fall asleep. As your brainwaves slow down, your muscles relax and your breathing and heart-rate become slower and steady. This stage typically lasts a few minutes and is important in helping you to achieve deeper states. Zepp Aura created by sound therapy professionals give you the potential to be able to achieve this first stage of sleep more easily by helping the brainwaves to achieve a lower frequency state. This can be particularly helpful if you have difficulty switching off or have busy thoughts running around your head. Your Zepp wearable and App will refer to this first stage of sleep as ‘light sleep’.
When you enter the second stage of sleep your heart-rate and breathing slows down further and your body will relax even more deeply. Eye movements will stop, and your brainwaves remain slow. This stage of sleep is referred to as ‘Deep Sleep’ on the App. It is harder to wake someone up if they are in this phase. Muscle tone, pulse, and breathing rate decrease as the body relaxes even further. This stage of sleep is crucial for helping you to feel refreshed and alert the next day. Heartbeat, breathing, and brain wave activity all reach their lowest levels, and the muscles are as relaxed as they will be. This stage will be longer at first and decrease in duration throughout the night.
The next stage of sleep is REM Sleep: The first REM stage usually occurs approximately 90 minutes after you fall asleep. This is the ‘dreaming’ stage of sleep. As you dream, your eyes move quickly back and forth under your eyelids and your heart rate, respiration and blood pressure all begin to increase. In case you decide to act out your dreams, to prevent you from injuring yourself and/or anyone sharing your bed, your arms and legs are paralysed during this stage of sleep. The duration of the REM cycle usually increases as the night progresses — check your Zepp App to see if this is the case with you. There are many studies that have shown that this stage of sleep helps us to make sense of, process and categorise our experiences as well as helping to store important events in our long-term memory.
You may also wake up briefly during the night but not register that this has happened the next day — check your App to see if you’ve woken up. These brief waking episodes are known as ‘W’ stages. If you wake up for longer than a few minutes and have difficulty falling back to sleep, choose Zepp Aura to start a new sleep cycle by triggering the first stage of sleep more easily.
Resources
- Why Do We Need Sleep? https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/why-do-we-need-sleep#:~:text=Sleep%20is%20an%20essential%20function,the%20brain%20cannot%20function%20properly
2. Four stages of sleep https://www.sleepfoundation.org/stages-of-sleep
3. Rasch B, Born J. 2013. About sleep's role in memory. Physiol Rev. Apr;93(2):681-766. doi: 10.1152/physrev.00032.2012. PMID: 23589831; PMCID: PMC3768102. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3768102/
4. Overview of Sleep https://www.msdmanuals.com/home/brain,-spinal-cord,-and-nerve-disorders/sleep-disorders/overview-of-sleep?query=sleep
