preview

Sleep Is A Critical Part Of Living A Healthy Lifestyle

Better Essays

Introduction “The average person spends one-third of their life asleep.”(Edelson, 1992) Everyone needs sleep to perform tasks in their life like picking their nephew up from daycare, spending time with your family, or even going to school. Sleep is a critical part of living a healthy lifestyle, but what if this time in our life is robbed from us? What if this important factor of life is taken from us by a disorder? In the U.S., one in eight people have a sleep disorder of some kind.( U.S. Census Bureau, 2014)Then you might ask yourself, what is a sleep disorder and what are the different treatments you can do to improve your condition? Discussion Before we define what a sleep disorder is, we first need to define what a normal night’s sleep is. Sleep occurs in time segments throughout the night. Each stage happens at different time segments during the average night’s sleep. In sleep, there are two critical divisions in sleep state that are called non-rapid eye movement, or non-REM and rapid eye movement, or REM. There are three stages of non-REM sleep with the last stage being in a deep sleep. The stages are called N1 sleep, N2 sleep, and N3 sleep. N1 sleep is the first stage of sleep and is also the lightest. People will have slow eye movements during this stages. The second stage of sleep is N2 sleep. EEGs ”EEGs during N2 sleep show sleep spindles and K complexes on a background of relatively low-voltage, mix frequency EEG activity.”(Division of Sleep Medicine, 2008) An

Get Access