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Your personal sleep cycle. Basics n°2 about sleep

If you start to take an interest in sleep, you’ll hear very quickly about “sleep cycles”. Indeed they are the basis for any understanding about sleep quality and body restoration since they are what your sleep is composed of.

This article is part of a series regarding the ‘basics’ you should know about your sleep. You can find the table of contents of this series here.

Simply put, when we sleep we go through several stages of sleep. These stages together constitute a sleep cycle and these sleep cycles will repeat several times during our sleep until we wake up definitely (yes definitely, because we wake up many times without knowing it during our nights).

You will read everywhere that a sleep cycle lasts around 90 minutes. But this remains an approximation as a common average. In reality, sleep cycles duration is not the same for everybody, it’s completely personal. The duration of sleep cycles varies between 70- and 110+ minutes. Moreover, the length of your cycles varies throughout your nights, and will not be the same from one night to another. Several factors will also influence the structure of your cycle, such as your age, activity, your fatigue, and your stress.

Sleep cycle example

But why does it matter to know the duration of your own sleep cycles?


Knowing the duration of your sleep cycles helps you understand the structure of your sleep. More importantly it will help you deduce how much sleep you need depending on your energy levels.

Knowing the duration of your sleep cycles can also be useful as long as you want to benefit from a smart waking up. This means waking up at the right time and enjoying your full cycles. In other words, not cutting off your recovery cycles by waking up in the middle of it. Indeed, waking up in the light sleep stage will make you feel more refreshed and will put you in a good spot to tackle your day. So if you want to be able to calibrate yourself in order to wake up naturally in your light sleep stage, you will have to know the duration of your own sleep cycle to calculate your bedtime.

I must confess it to you, it is complicated to know the duration of your sleep cycles on your own and without a tracking device.

That’s where the Circular ring can help you. The ring detects, thanks to your heart derived metrics, your temperature & your movements, the duration of your sleep periods and analyzes in which stage of sleep you are to wake you up silently during light sleep.


Conclusion


As we said at the beginning of this post, we move through different stages during our sleep cycles. But what are the specificities of each sleep stage and what are their benefits to us? If you want to know more about your sleep stages, read the following post: The sleep stages that compose your sleep cycle. Basics n°3 about sleep

Laurent Bsalis

Laurent is passionate about biohacking and tries his best to be a better version of himself. He also eats too much ice cream which is a problem.

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