Take a look at the new sleeping guide by Time4Sleep for a wonderfully interactive guide to the sleep cycle – and what you can do to improve it.
We’re huge fans of Time4Sleep’s new sleeping guide; not only is it informative but it’s also quite beautiful, and it made us all miss our beds a little too much as we were reading it!
There’s quite a lot to take in when you first look at the page, which starts you off at sleep stage 1 “Drowsy” – that blissful feeling as you’re just slipping off to the land of nod. Clicking around the page you can see a huge amount of information, from how your brain and body reacts and shuts down to how the smallest changes in your hormone levels and even your immune system.
You can also see how your brainwaves change as you slip into a deeper sleep, which is pretty fascinating in itself – it’s incredible to see how the brain’s activity actually speeds up as we slip into non-REM sleep and returns to a waking-like state while we dream.
Beauty Sleep
Fashion and beauty lovers will of course be interested to note that there is a detailed section on how the skin heals and recovers during the night, giving you even more insight into the way your skin maintains itself. We read around to find out as much as we could, and it seems that the concept of “beauty sleep” really does ring true! During deep sleep – stage four of Time4Sleep’s interactive guide – the skin reproduces cells at a vastly increased rate, and the proteins which help us repair damage by the sun are broken down much more slowly at this point of the sleep cycle.
The fourth stage of the sleep cycle isn’t just good for the skin; this increased activity and slower breakdown of proteins is what makes sleep the most efficient time for healing, allowing our bodies to self-repair to a seriously impressive extent. It’s for this reason that napping during the day doesn’t have as much of an effect on healing or recovery.
Whether you want to learn how to improve your sleeping pattern or just find out how your body falls asleep each night, the guide is a great way to find out – take a look and let us know what you learn!
