If you spend your days in an office under fluorescent lights and your evening glued to a screen until the final moment, it is true that you fall asleep because of being tired, however you won’t be able to rest at night (due to the lack of melatonin through which our internal organs typically recognize that it is night and time to rest). Plenty of people say that they “have no problem falling asleep in front of the television,” unfortunately this is a bad sign they are falling asleep in a bad place. When it comes to assessing the quality of it, it is not just about length, but about the depth and quality of each phase. Initially, they will be creeping and manageable and probably not attributable to insufficient sleep, but these will grow into chronic health problems over years and decades.īut for sleep to be sleep, and not to just be some state of unconsciousness, and for it to perform a variety of healing and key functions for the body and brain, it must be preceded by a prelude throughout the entire day and must have the right timing and length. If they diverge regularly, for example, if you don’t have enough melatonin in your blood before falling asleep, problems will start to accumulate. These two cycles should be in sync with each other. Sleep is initiated by at least two major processes: fatigue (sleep pressure, the adenosine cycle) and the excretion of melatonin into the blood (the Circadian rhythm). The time from switching off the lights to falling asleep is referred to as latency. The rest of the night is filled with wakefulness. These cycles take turns after about 90 minutes and cleverly follow each other. These are NREM1 to NREM4 (NREM1 and NREM2 are light sleep, NREM3 and NREM 4 range from deep sleep to very deep sleep) as well as the REM phase. Healthy sleep has a typical multi-stage architecture. REM, NREM and Everything Around Themįirst of all, let’s recapitulate the terminology and some basic facts.
In this fairly lengthy text, I want to present the results of a month-by-month comparison of several state-of-the-art sleep screening devices (I refer to them simply as sleep trackers) that are intended to be used at home.
Further proof of this can be seen not only in the extraordinary success and response to Walker’s bestselling book Why We Sleep (+ the buzz around it), but also by the growing number of gadgets and apps that have been developed to measure, evaluate and even influence sleep. According to the number of grim stories of tired friends and loved ones who boast on the one hand that they “don’t need to sleep more than 6 hours”, and at the same are putting on weight or have various chronic health problems, I would say that his estimate is still conservative. It’s still a familiar feeling up to today, only I’m just worrying about what the next day will be like, not about wild boars.:) Sleep is extremely important, it’s the pillar on which our physical and mental performance depends, our health, regeneration, metabolism, the speed at which we age…Īnd yet, as Professor Matthew Walker says, 80% of people in the West are suffering from sleep deprivation today. I will never forget the constant waking up, the long hesitation, the childhood fear, the chill in the air and the silent envy that the others were still asleep - in summer camps and on trips, when I had to leave the warmth of my sleeping bag several times a night to go out and pee somewhere in the dark. Since the times of diapers or maybe it would be better to say since the times of sleeping in sleeping bags. Perhaps it’s already clear to my readers from the number of articles I have written on sleep that I’ve been trying to find my way through this “hall of mirrors” of my life for a long time.
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