We actually don't know the function of sleep all that well yet, but sleep is a time of quiescence in the brain.

Shelby Harris

Categorized in : Sleep Brain Function

We think is happening in the brain, the way I like to think about it is, it's almost like, you're brain is going through all these stages of sleep and it's developing in children so fast that it's almost like you're shifting gears in a car. And at some point, you actually stall out a little bit, and that's kind of what happens during a night terror.

sleep night children

Night terrors are in deep sleep, and they're more common in kids, as are nightmares, but what happens in a night terror is like a flash - we think a flash of some image or something happens in the brain. We don't really quite know what. And it usually ends up with the child screaming almost like screaming bloody murder. It's very scary for the parents or whoever else is around.

sleep kids children

Night terrors are very different from nightmares. A lot of people will think they're the same, but they're really not. Night terrors - you want to look at the time of night when you're having the problem. Night Terrors happen in deep sleep. Nightmares tend to happen in a lighter REM sleep.

sleep night thinking

There are people who have repetitive nightmares. And what happens is their brain is trying to process the stress and help their brain actually deal with what happens if this stress happens again, so their brain's preparing them to deal with it in case the stress happens again, but it's so scary that they awaken from it.

stress scary people

When it comes to the reason why we have nightmares, we're still debating that. It's a new area of research, nightmares. And the way I like to think about it is, our brain - we have stress during the day and our brain needs to learn to process this stress.

stress brain thinking

We try not using medications initially, and we use something called behavioral therapy for insomnia. This changes behaviors people do in bed, none of the tossing and turning.

insomnia trying people

So if somebody has chronic pain, we want to manage the pain, but we still want to treat the insomnia separately. So what we'll tend to do in our sleep lab is we'll do a thorough evaluation and we usually have myself, who is a Psychologist and a Sleep Behavioral Sleep Specialist, I treat the patients first.

pain insomnia sleep

So the deeper stages of sleep are really those times of quiescence, you're really restoring your body and we have a few different stages of sleep.

different body sleep

So you have Sleep Stage One, Two, and then Three/Four. One is a little bit lighter stage of the quiet, non-REM sleep and then Three/Four is really deep, deep sleep. And what you want is, you actually want a number of - you want to go through all of these stages throughout the night.

sleep numbers night

So people only focus on getting the really deep sleep, but in reality, we spend almost 60% of the night in the stage two sleep.

sleep night reality

So we go through in the beginning of the night, we go into the really deep stages of sleep and we actually cycle through. So, when you go down to the deep stage, then you go back up and you actually come into something called REM sleep, which is after about 90 minutes.

really-deep sleep night

So when you're in REM sleep, your brain is very active, our body is quiet, but your brain is really processing a lot of things, a lot of emotions; we dream the most in REM sleep. And then you go back down in the deep stages, and so on and so forth.

dream brain sleep

And you cycle throughout so that you do about five to six cycles throughout the night. And we spend more time in REM later on in the night than we do earlier on.

more-time six night

People tend to remember their dreams in the morning a little bit better and if earlier in the night, when you're in a lot of deep sleep, if someone wakes you, or the phone rings or something, you're really confused.

confused dream morning

Really if it's an hour or two after you've fallen asleep because you're in such a deep sleep at that point.

hours sleep two

Decrements in attention and concentration, being able to learn more efficiently, that's just not as good. Also, there are motor vehicle accidents, workplace accidents, we see that a lot.

motor-vehicles able attention

When you're in the more deeper stages of sleep - REM sleep, your body is quiet, but your mind is actually very active. So it's a time when your body and your brain is restoring itself. It's repairing any cell damage that happened during the day, it's really repairing, like I said, repairing your body, but also helps with digestion, helps with memory.

cells sleep memories

So when you go to sleep at night, if you're someone who hasn't had any sleep deprivation, you have a very normal sleep pattern, what we tend to see is that, in adults, they go to bed and they start off by going into the deeper stages sleep.

bed sleep night

Workplace accidents with people who are sleep deprived or people who work shifts and they don't get the right amount of sleep during the day or at night.

sleep night people

There are some patients who just have insomnia and they've had it since they were a kid and we don't quite know why. So when we look at the cause, we definitely want to treat whatever else is going on, but insomnia often because it becomes its own diagnosis and that requires its own treatment.

want insomnia kids