Why Both REM and Non-REM Sleep Are Important For Health

There are so many health benefits from sleep, especially for the brain. Some stages of sleep will even have the brain 30% more active than awake. Sleep is so important that losing some increases chances of a heart attack. Unfortunately, long hours working and commuting are taking away sleep time. 

It is not a luxury to have a full night's worth of sleep but a necessity. People just don’t notice how terrible their performance is lacking sleep. Sadly, as people lose sleep, their degraded performance becomes the norm. Then, before you realize your sleep problems with disorders, fix your sleep.

Sleep has 4 stages of non-REM sleep and REM sleep when we dream. The balance between REM and non-REM sleep changes over the night. However, more impactful REM sleep is lost in the latter part of the night. Then, waking up early takes away deeper sleep at the latter half of sleep.

Any unimportant phase of sleep would have been phased out by now. Every stage of sleep is important and they happen throughout 8 hours. Both REM and non-REM sleep are important but REM lengthens life. People who get more REM sleep then are likely to live longer than others.

At least 7 hours of sleep is needed to retain mental and physical health. People age faster hormonally when not getting at least 7 hours of sleep. Blood sugar levels would also be disrupted by a lack of sleep. You may even be pushed to being pre-diabetic if you lose lots of sleep.

Just losing 2 hours of your sleep can already ruin your genetic material. Genes can be over or under-expressed due to a lack of sleep in people. Genetic changes due to sleep loss make people more disease-prone. This shows how getting 8 hours of sleep is needed to maintain health.

Biologically, being awake is low-level brain damage that sleep heals. Less than 6 hours of sleep over months makes you Alzheimer’s prone. Even healthy people have more risk of Alzheimer’s if they are sleep deprived. Then, it’s clear that sleep is powerful in lessening the chance of Alzheimer’s

Source: Matthew Walker