Fully asleep, your brain activity slows but includes bursts of electrical activity. Stage 2 is where light sleep gets to work. The first stage is simply the act of transitioning from awake to asleep and makes up less than 3% of your nightly sleep cycles. Light sleep is broken down into stages 1 and 2. Breathing, heart rate and muscle changes prepare your body for the deeper sleep to come.

Light sleep is the beginning of your sleep cycle and your body's way of winding down. I'm going to break down non-REM sleep into two further categories that are often used by sleep trackers. In general, scientists and researchers divide the cycles into two broad categories: non-REM and REM sleep. The best known is REM, which stands for rapid eye movement, because your eyes move rapidly during this stage of sleep. This is What Happened What are sleep cycles? Read more: I Went to Sleep with a Robot to Get Better Sleep. Here's how to decode your sleep cycles so you can make the most of your shut-eye. But all that data only makes sense if you know what you're aiming for and what it all means. Smart beds, sleep trackers and wearables of all sorts help us track our sleep.Įach morning you can review your heart rate, breath rate and sleep graphs with information about how much light, deep and REM sleep you had the night before. Thankfully, quantifying how good or bad our sleep patterns are is now easier than ever. For many of us, achieving the 8 hours of recommended sleep doesn't always mean we're getting enough quality sleep. If you're still feeling tired the next morning after getting enough sleep the night before, you aren't alone.

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