Older people tend to sleep less than their younger counterparts, but not because they don't need sleep. It is thought that deep sleep begins to decrease at a rate of about 2 percent per decade between the ages of 20 and 60. As much as 40 percent of a teen's stage 3 sleep will convert to stage 2 sleep by the time they achieve adulthood. Deep sleep in teens and adultsĪt around age 15, slow wave sleep is still critical to growth, but many teens experience changes and disruptions to their sleep architecture which may be related to changes caused by puberty and hormone shifts.Įventually their sleep architecture shifts to match the regularity and needs of adults, which includes a tapering off of slow wave sleep as adolescents move into adulthood. It makes sense that children should have more deep sleep stage 3 sleep gives them adequate rest and fuel for growing neural networks, blood cells, muscle fibers, and other important physiogical building blocks. Instead, they have "active" sleep, "quiet" sleep, and "indeterminate" sleep.īabies and young children enjoy healthy amounts of deep sleep as they move from episodes of active and quiet sleep (which are a few hours long) to more consolidated periods of sleep that resemble the stages we experience as adults. Newborns and infants don't have the same sleep architecture as those who are older.Ī sleeping baby has 3 kinds of sleep which are shown to be different from our usually stages 1 to 3 and REM. This is related to the body's need to release growth hormone. How much deep sleep you get depends a lot on how old you are. However, in current models, stage 4 and stage 3 sleep are generally merged under the category of deep sleep, as there is little reason to make these distinctions in the clinical environment. Original rules for measuring sleep stages included another category of delta wave sleep called stage 4 sleep. In children, it's what allows them to fully develop in adults, it's how our body maintains and repairs itself. Perhaps the most important part of deep sleep is the release of HGH. This can make it difficult to wake up a person in the middle of deep sleep. Fortunately, we experience most of our deep sleep in the first third of the night. Though stage 3 sleep only last a few minutes per cycle, it is the time of your sleep when you are least likely to be aroused. While half of our nights are spent in stage 2 sleep, and a quarter in REM sleep, we should also spend about 15 to 20 percent of our nights in deep sleep. pituitary gland releases human growth hormone (HGH).body tissues are repaired and new tissue growth occurs at the cellular level.These slow waves lead to muscle relaxation and a slower breathing rate this sets the stage for growth and healing. When deep sleep occurs, it is shown in the brain as large waves that resemble a delta pattern. In normal sleep architecture, we experience four different stages of sleep: stage 1 sleep (very light transitional sleep), stage 2 sleep (the stage of sleep we enjoy the most), REM stage sleep (in which we dream, and stage 3, or deep sleep (the deepest stage of sleep).Īs the chart to the right illustrates, each of the stages of sleep is identifiable, based on an electroencephalogram reading, by the appearance of the brain waves. If we are to remain healthy and functional into our later years, we really need to do everything we can to get our deep sleep. The amount we get depends not only on the quality of our sleep in general, but also on our age. Stage 3 sleep, also known as deep sleep, slow-wave sleep, or delta sleep, is important for a number of reasons. Much has been made about the importance of getting your rapid-eye movement sleep (REM sleep), but there's another stage of sleep that's crucial to good health as well.
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