Stages of Sleep

Here's a simple poster illustrating our stages of sleep:

Stage 1: State of resting by closing our eyes. Our brain activity slows down, our body relaxed, but we're still conscious of our environment.

Stage 2: When awoken by others in this stage, we might not even know we've fallen asleep!

Stage 3 & 4: They are often combined and is also known as Slow Wave Sleep (SWS), a name that derives from our brain activity. Also, this is the stage where our homeostatic pressure (the intensity and need for sleep) is recovered back to "baseline".

Note: The longer we go without sleep, the higher our homeostatic pressure will be! This process in different from our body's circadian system, but rather they both complement each other. 

"Stage 5" Rapid Eye Movement (REM) Sleep : Here, we are most likely to enter dreamworld and even able to recall what the dream was about. Researchers have been trying to find out what is the purpose of dreams and the purpose of REM sleep, and found out that REM sleep is especially critical for memory consolidation, controlling emotions as well as developing creativity.

P.S. The lady in this diagram is being hooked up to what we call a Polysomnogram (PSG), which is a diagnostic tool used in the study of sleep to measure sleep progression. The PSG has three main components - the EEG to measure the brain, EOG for our eye movements and EMG for muscle movements.

Really sleepy now, gonna head to bed now!

Don’t Weed out that good night’s sleep!

Alright, let’s be honest here. A good number of college students here in America have smoked Marijuana (weed) at least once in their lifetime. We all know that ‘Herb’ has a sedative effect and makes people feel ‘high’ and carefree. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not playing the devil’s advocate here. In fact, with such rampant use of Marijuana under the table, there is a need to inform you guys about the negative effects of weed on human functioning, especially the all-important beauty sleep!

So what is it in weed that brings about such ‘high’ and carefree experiences? Well, weed’s primary active constituent is delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (Δ⁹-THC), the chemical responsible for sedative effect. It is proposed that endogenous cannabinoids from smoking weed increase adenosine (a sleep promoter), resulting in sedation. Unfortunately for you insomniacs, this is one drug you don’t want to take to help you snug in bed. What actually happens instead is, you get robbed of your good sleep (REM sleep - when memory consolidation occurs), which you wouldn’t want, especially if you’ve just saturated your brain for that test tomorrow morning. In addition, studies have shown that smoking weed reduces sleep efficiency (time spent sleeping/ time spent in bed) and longer sleep onset. What this means is, you’ll spend more time rolling on the bed than sleeping.

From a study conducted, a major problem in the treatment of Marijuana users is that up to 76% of those who abruptly stop using Marijuana report disturbed sleep (strange dreams, insomnia, poor sleep quality), possibly increasing the risk of relapse. In addition, it is reported that the Prefrontal Cortex of the brain (which plays an important role in normal sleep) showed alterations in people with insomnia, sleep deprivation and 30-day abstinent heavy Marijuana use. To put this into perspective, once you start on that weed, your sleep will be disturbed and good quality sleep will be a thing of the past, even months after cessation.

As college students, we are already so sleep deprived with all the looming deadlines and tests. Why rob yourself of more sleep by smoking weed? Don’t even start on it! :)

Citation:

Bolla KI; Lesage SR; Gamaldo CR; Neubauer DN; Funderburk FR; Cadet JL; David PM; Verdejo-Garcia A; Benbrook AR. Sleep disturbance in heavy marijuana users. SLEEP 2008;31(6):901-908.