Stage of sleep - psychology - Essay Example

Going over the information covered in class, “Stage” 1 and “Stage” 3 read to me more like doorways to actual stages, instead of being stages themselves. The reason I felt that way was both because of the length of those two stages, and because of the way they seem designed to build up to the next stage. Neither one of them felt like they were defined individually, but were based on the stage that came after them. Stage 1 of the sleep cycle lasts only about 5-10 minutes, and was technically defined as the transition period between wakefulness and sleep.

What came to my mind was the short period of grogginess people usually experience when they first wake up in the morning. They’re eyes are open, and they’re obviously not asleep any more. However, their minds and bodies haven’t fully reached alertness, so they’re not fully awake, either. That grogginess is kind of a limbo between being asleep and being awake, and I think that Stage 1 is the same thing, only going the opposite direction. Stage 3 is almost identical to Stage 1, with the only real difference being where it comes in the sleep cycle.

It lasts about the same amount of time as Stage 1, and is also a transition period. Thinking of the transitional stages, particularly Stage 1, as being somewhat separate from the rest of the stages should help me get to sleep faster. One way I could to that would be to create a kind of transition period or routine before I try to get to Stage 1. Remembering that Stage 2 is where the body begins to relax and slow down—the heart beat and body temperature, specifically, go down—then Stage 1 can be thought of as designed to take us from being fully alert to being ready for a kind of light hibernation.

If I were to spend some time just before going to bed listening to quiet music or reading a soothing book, I could potentially make Stage 1 of sleep easier to get in to and through. I was surprised to learn that the stages of sleep do not follow a logical, sequential order of 1-2-3-4-5. When we first began covering the stages of sleep, that is the order I thought they would follow, and those five stages would somehow take up a person’s full night of sleeping. It would have made sense to me for some people to need each stage to last longer—meaning that they need to have more hours of sleep at night to feel rested—and others would be able to get by with shorter stages.

However, what I learned was that the stages of sleep actually go a little out of order. According to an article entitled “Stages of Sleep,” the order is more like 1-2-3-4-3-2-5-2 and that order is repeated a few times every night (Cherry, 2011). Realizing that our bodies go through several cycles of the five stages of sleep throughout the night gives me some ideas for what to make my sleeping environment like. In going over the material from our class lectures, as well as reviewing the information providing in the article “Stages of Sleep,” it’s apparent to me that people go through Stage 2 more times in a night than any other stage.

Stage 2 is the one where the body begins to become more relaxed before going in to a deep sleep. In this stage of physiological change, people might be fairly easy to wake. So, I would take that knowledge and create an environment in my room that encourages me to stay asleep once I fall asleep. Maybe I could play some quiet music in the background that would minimize the effect of noises in the night on my subconscious. The idea