Lifestyle Choices

Sleep is a great healer. It regenerates your body, rejuvenates your skin, clears emotional conflicts, and helps you think and work at top efficiency. It is another form of relaxation essential to health and beauty. In many ways, though, sleep remains a mystery in spite of all the elaborate research that has been done into how and why we sleep and dream.

Most of the common notions about sleep are untrue. For instance, sleep is not some kind of “little death” from which you are rescued every morning. Nor do you go to bed to fall deeper and deeper into sleep until you reach bottom somewhere after midnight, after which you come closer and closer to consciousness until you finally awaken. Also, deep sleep is not any more beneficial than light sleep. And we do not necessarily need the obligatory eight hours a night to remain well and fresh- looking.

 

The Two Faces of Sleep

There are two kinds of sleep: orthodox sleep, which is dreamless—sometimes called “synchronized slow-wave sleep” (S) because of the brain wave patterns that accompany it—and is vital for physical restoration of the body, and paradoxical sleep, during which dreaming occurs along with rapid eye movement (REM)—sometimes called desynchronized sleep (D)—and which is essential to your mental and emotional stability. Research into sleep measured by electroencephalograms has shown that all of us spend our sleep time in and out of the two stages in a predictable rhythmic pattern. If for any reason this pattern is repeatedly disturbed, we suffer.

There are four levels or depths to orthodox sleep. When you fall asleep you move into the first level, characterized by low-amplitude fast- frequency brain wave patterns. (Sometimes sleep starts with a sudden twitching movement that is called a myoclonic jerk. This is the result of a sudden flare-up of electrical activity in the brain, as in a minor epileptic seizure.) Then, as you move to level two and even deeper into levels three and four, there is a general slowing of the frequency and an increase in the amplitude of your brain waves. All through each night you move in and out of these levels in your own characteristic pattern.

Normally one falls off to sleep and remains for a short time at level one and two and then plunges into levels three or four to stay there for seventy to one hundred minutes. At that point comes the first period of REM or paradoxical sleep when dreams begin. This dream period of REM lasts only ten to twenty minutes. It is repeated again at about ninety-minute intervals throughout the night, with orthodox, undreaming sleep in between.

During orthodox sleep your body is quiet. Heartbeat slows down, blood pressure falls slightly, and your breathing gets slower and more regular. Even your digestive system slows down. In the deeper levels of orthodox sleep, brain waves gradually become more synchronized, as if everything in your body is at peace. During these times, your body’s restorative processes come into their own, rapidly repairing damaged tissues and cells, producing antibodies to fight infection, and carrying out a myriad of other duties necessary to keep you healthy. Without orthodox sleep in all its different stages, this important vegetative restoration does not take place properly and you become more prone to illness, early aging, fatigue, and muddled thinking. Orthodox sleep is the master restorer.

REM sleep, which is diametrically opposite to orthodox sleep in many ways, is just as vital. It more than earns its name “paradoxical” by being a mass of contradictions: although the body is virtually paralyzed during the REM state, the fingers and face often twitch and the genitals become erect. Breathing speeds up to the level of your normal waking state. Heartbeat rate, blood pressure, and temperature rise and adrenalin shoots through the system. Beneath the lids, eyes move rapidly from side to side as though you were looking at a film or tennis match. And this is exactly what is happening—you are viewing images that come rapidly in succession. Your brain waves in the REM state show a marked similarity to the rapid, irregular patterns of being awake.

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