Good morning!
1 day until US Shipping! The Online Shopping Cart will be activated Thursday at 9am EST. I will be providing a link from OSG and Glo Bakery websites at 9am sharp.
It’s funny because this week I have been swamped with Canadian orders!
I guess the Canadians want to beat the US rush! Smart thinking! ;)
Be sure to check out the Shopping Cart + Shipping FAQ for the answers to all of your pressing questions!
- Please take special note of item 15 on the FAQ page. Keep in mind that quantities on the shopping cart will be limited to start off with. I am going to make available the amount of bars that I can make in a 2 week period. I want to ensure that I maintain excellent customer service which is why I have decided to control how many orders I will be getting all at once. Please don’t despair if you do not get an order in on Thursday! I will be updating the quantities on the shopping cart as I bake new batches.
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How Do You Sleep?
Speaking of losing sleep, I thought it would be timely to do a post on The Sleep Cycle from my book The Owner’s Manual For The Brain.
First, here are a few fun facts about sleep:
- The average person gets 7.5 hours sleep
- Infants get on average 14 hours sleep
- Seniors get on average 6 hours sleep
- Before the invention of electric lights, humans slept for 9 hours on average
- When all cues to time of day are removed (pitch black), humans sleep about 10.3 hours
How do you measure up to these stats?
Personally, when I don’t have my alarm set, I naturally wake up after 8-9 hours of sleep.
The Sleep Cycle is KEY!
- However, it is not the length of sleep that we get that causes us to be refreshed. It is actually the amount of complete sleep-wake cycles that we get!
Each sleep cycle has 5 phases:
The average cycle is 1 hour and 30 minutes, however cycle length can vary from 60-120 mins. depending on the person.
If we truly were to sleep without any disturbances and no alarm clocks, we would always wake up on a multiple of 90 minutes. For example after: 4.5 hours, 6 hours, or 9 hours of sleep.
E.g., 5 complete sleep cycles = 90 mins + 90 mins. + 90 mins. + 90 mins + 90 mins = 7.5 hours of sleep.
Non-REM sleep lasts about 70 minutes per cycle, while REM sleep lasts about 20 minutes per cycle. REM sleep is when we DREAM!
Here is the kicker:
A person who only gets 4 cycles of undisturbed sleep (6 hours) will actually be much more rested than a person who has slept for 8-10 hours but who has not been allowed to complete any one cycle because of being awakened before it was completed.
This is why many top sleep doctors advise people not to sleep with pets in the bed, because often pets disturb your sleep several times during the night and you feel very tired the next day and not know why.
I wish Eric and I could follow this advice! ;) Sketchie happily sleeps at Eric’s feet every single night and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Want to wake up easier? Don’t wake up in REM sleep!
The time between our REM sleep (stage 5) and Stage 2 is called the Twilight Zone (Stage 1). The Twilight Zone is the brief period in between each 90 min. sleep cycle. If you are in Stage 1 of sleep, it is very easy to wake up. You will find that any light stimulus will wake you from a light noise to the sun rising.
Waking up in the second half of your sleep cycle (especially during REM sleep) is often very difficult. Many people report not being able to wake up.
Get this: When we are in REM sleep, our motor output system from the brain is completely shut down (this is why we dream that we are running but we don’t actually run) and also explains why we feel so lifeless when we wake up during REM sleep! Now of course, the motor output system doesn’t always turn off, and we see this especially with sleepwalkers. That is another topic though!
This morning, I woke up in the middle of a dream (REM sleep) and I felt like I was hit by a truck when my alarm went off (even though I had technically the proper ‘length’ of sleep!). I couldn’t wake up for a good hour and walked around like a zombie.
However, if you wake up in the beginning stages of sleep (especially the Twilight Zone), you will find that you wake up easier and feel so refreshed when you get up. I often wonder why some mornings it is so easy to wake up and others it is a battle. This explains a lot!
So fun things to try out:
- Keep a Sleep Journal.
Record the beginning and waking times for each natural sleep episode that is uninterrupted by an alarm or other disturbance. Find the common multiple. For example, if your recorded sleep periods were 400, 500, 400, 200, and 700 minutes, you would conclude that your personal sleep cycle typically lasts 100 minutes, or 1.6 hours. If you don’t want to keep a journal, just assume it is 90 minutes in length.
2. Plan your waking accordingly
For example, if my cycle is 90 minutes and I fall asleep at midnight every night, I should plan to wake at any of the following times: 6am, 7:30am, or 9am. All three of these times are multiples of 90 minutes. I would technically be waking up after a full sleep cycle, ideally. If I got up at 8:30am, I would be getting up in the later stages of sleep and would probably find it more difficult to wake up. Apparently there are devices that you can buy to simplify the process.
This morning, I naturally woke up in the Twilight Zone. I felt awake and ready to get up, but since it was earlier than I needed to get up I allowed myself to fall back to sleep for another 45 minutes. Well, when I woke up 45 minutes later it was almost impossible to wake up (I woke up in the middle of a dream). That’ll teach me! ;)
3. Visualize Waking Up
In an interesting study published in Sleep in 1997, participants were asked to visualize their time of waking on an imaginary clock face. Results found that those who visualized what time they had to get up were naturally able to wake up at the desired time without any alarm (this is SO me!). The key techniques: Get the same amount of sleep nightly, visualize the time you want to wake up, and use a back up (a clock set 10 minutes later than your desired time).
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What are you sleep-wake patterns like? Do you think you get enough undisturbed sleep?
I usually have no problems sleeping. However, every so often one little pointy footed dog will decide to stomp over the top of me in the middle of the night and that wakes me up!
Courtney
Adventures in Tri-ing
This is interesting. I know I don’t get enough undisturbed sleep, but I blame it on my cat. I am a very light sleeper, so my cat sometimes wakes me up by scratching at the window at insects that are outside, or jumping up on my dresser and knocking things down. He is annoying, but I love him too much to keep him out of my bedroom at night. He starts off every night by sleeping at my feet, but then he wakes and the mischief begins. Sometimes I sleep through it though. The things we do for our pets!
Wow, so interesting!
I always wondered why some morning it feels nearly impossible to wake up!
Great post, I learned so much….I definitely agree on the last part about the timing of your wake up. Sunday night I slept over 9 hours and woke up feeling like I got hit by a bus…but I KNOW my alarm went off in the middle of a dream.
Our kitty used to sleep with us every night (for 5 years), lately he stopped (after we took him to get his teeth cleaned, maybe he’s still mad at us). I miss it so much! :)
Hi Angela :) Great post !
**BEGIN RANT**
As I sit here typing, I am in that zombie like state you described…. And it’s totally my fault. lol I have a cat and she knows that when I get up, she gets breakfast. My husband and I have recently started getting up about 2 hours earlier each morning because of his new job and our cat has figured out she can walk on us, nudge with her head and lick up to death until we admit defeat and get her her ‘breakfast’ even when its much earlier than we want to be up. AHHHHH We have created a monster! This morning the bumping and nudging began about an hour before our 6:30am alarm HAHAHAHA *sigh* The silly thing is, I am a behavioral psych major and I know how to fix this, but I have a hard time making her wait until later to feed her (set a schedule: 8am and then at 5pm for feeding) but it’s hard to not give in when she’s crying and crying (she’s 1/2 Siamese) Sorry for going on and on ;P …guess your post really spoke to me as I was drinking my 2nd cup of joe to try and shake the zombie like state I woke up in… haha
**END RANT**
PS I voted for you on FoodBuzz!! Good luck!!!! You deserve it :D
hahahah…oh man!!!! The things we do for pets eh?
Thanks for your vote!!!
My husband and I turned off our alarm 10 years ago and have been much better rested for it. We used some vacation time from work to allow our biological clocks to kick in, so we were even able to go alarm-free when working for someone else. Of course, now we just roll out of bed into our home offices which is nice :)
We couldn’t keep the cat off our bed if we tried!
I get about 9 hours when I just wake up on my own. 10pm-7am is pretty much perfection. Unfortunately, that isn’t how the cookie crumbles during the week. It’s more like 9:30-10:30 (depending on if I have class) and up at 5am!
I try to get 7 hours a day. But that’s not uninterrupted. I usually get up at least once to go to the bathroom. I do feel rested though usually.
Same cat issues here…except that we have 2…But it’s okay, one sleeps in the very corner of my half, the other one on top of my boyfriend.
What you wrote about feeling refreshed when you wake up in the first part of the sleep cycle totally makes sense. That is also why powernaps work so good! You do get the rest of being in the first cycle, but you won’t feel like a zombie when you have to wake up after max 20 minutes.
It’s so amazing-I’m just learning about the REM cycles in my psych class!
Interesting!! Sadly I live downtown, right next to a hospital, so I hear very loud sirens all night! I have a fan in my room to create some white noise, but sometimes I still get woken up! Boo.
I have to sleep with a fan too!
Love all the “sleep” information, thank you!
It is funny because I have been wanting to start getting up earlier……6am……to start running in the morning (once the time changes that is as it is too dark to do it now) and I was a bit worried about not getting enough sleep!
No More! I would get at least 7 hours (6 hours of good sleep) so that is enough for me. =)
My husband always sleeps “6” strong, out cold, hours and is always up and ready to go after so that fact is SO TRUE.
=) Laura @ Finding A Healthy Balance (after “100 Pound” weight loss)
Thank you for posting this!! You have really encouraged me to tackle this, which is a major road block right now in my overall health. I love the kicking pets out, but it’s hard, that’s when my shy cat gets cuddle time, and knowing when to set up your wake time by sleep cycle is a golden tip, I will be following this–one of my posts last week was on sleep and I have failed to hit the early bed time I wanted. Thanks Angela!!
Thanks for this. The alarm went off this morning while I was in the middle of a crazy dream about the Duggar family. I felt like a zombie which made no sense considering I’d logged enough hours in bed. I’ll give your tips a try and see if I can find that sleepy balance.
Great article, Ange! This topic is very interesting.
I always wake up in the middle of crazy dream sleep – and the dreams are SO weird! I have actually been trying to fix my “clock” for the past few weeks so it will definitely be an experiment to start doing!
Apparently when I was little my parents would take me to see various friends and when it came time for me to go to bed, they would just put me behind a couch and I would go right to sleep! People would always ask if they would like to use a bed or a cot, and they would always be appreciative but said I could sleep anywhere!! I remember pretty much all my dreams – which is both good and bad! The former owner of our new place left behind his darkening shades (he was a medical resident at the time and so on shift work) and they have been awesome. Sleep SO much better than our last place. The only times I don’t sleep well are if I have to be somewhere very early in the morning and can’t be late. I keep waking up 2-3 times in the night thinking I’ve overslept!
I rarely get more than 5 hours. Most weekdays I get about 4 due to all of the things that I have to fit into a day: work, class, taking care of Snuffy, studying.
that’s fascinating about the way you can track sleep cycles – i want to try that out! it’s also interesting that people sleep more in pitch black – my bedroom actually has no windows, and when i first moved in, i could not wake up for the life of me. i had been used to naturally waking up around 6, and i remember one saturday being shocked to wake up at 9. light is definitely a factor!
thanks for always presenting such varied, well-researched information. this was a great post!
We let our cat sleep with us, too. She always likes to spoon next to me (yep, another spooning cat) – I only feel bad because it makes my husband jealous that she picks me over him! But I definitely wake up a few times a night from her moving around – usually every hour or so from 3am on. I don’t mind it enough to kick her off the bed though!
I’m definitely going to do some sleep-tracking… if I don’t workout in the morning I never will, and with work at 8:15 I have been getting up so early and if I wake up feeling refreshed it makes such a huge difference in how I feel the whole day.