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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.

Shelby Harris

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Shelby Harris
Age: 33
Born: 1991
Born: August 11
American Football Player
Football Player
Milwaukee City
Wisconsin
Littles
Bits
Lighters
Little
Stage
Lighter
Really
Sleep
Stages
Four
Throughout
Actually
Number
Night
Quiet
Three
Deep
Two
Numbers

More quotes by Shelby Harris

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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.
Shelby Harris
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Really if it's an hour or two after you've fallen asleep because you're in such a deep sleep at that point.
Shelby Harris
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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.
Shelby Harris
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There's a problem for them [teens] when they have to get up and go to school in the morning, they're very sleepy, yet on the weekends, they'll sleep 12 hours, they'll sleep late and then go to bed late and wake up late. And on vacations, it's not a problem.
Shelby Harris
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We haven't really - it's harder for us to set those rhythms. So it's really important to keep a steady bedtime and wake time to really lock in those rhythms.
Shelby Harris
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So, sleep deprivation, and sometimes an insomnia, which is a little bit of a different form, but just getting a lack of sleep, can lead to a number of different decrements.
Shelby Harris
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Now narcolepsy is really hard though because they're very tired during the day, they're sleepy during the day and it's managed mostly with medications. So we use medications to help them sleep better at night and to stay away during the day. But there are behavioral things you can do also by changing diet, exercise, having an actual nap schedule.
Shelby Harris
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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.
Shelby Harris
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If you're going somewhere East from here, generally what you want to do is you want to try to have your bed time earlier and earlier so what we'll do is I'll have someone adjust for a week or two by going to be 15 minutes earlier and getting up 15 minutes earlier every night. So that can be a really simple thing.
Shelby Harris
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For some people they say, it's about wish fulfillment, it's about the things you are never able to do in your day you are actually fulfilling at night. There are other people who will say that it's actually telling you something.
Shelby Harris
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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.
Shelby Harris
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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.
Shelby Harris
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Now circadian rhythms become very interesting and problematic for patients because when you become a teenager, your rhythms actually tend to naturally shift.
Shelby Harris
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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.
Shelby Harris
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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.
Shelby Harris
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There are some people who believe that dreams really are just kind of a throwaway thing. They are just a way of your brain processing what's happening during the day, but there's really no meaning to them a lot of imagery of just flashes of what happened.
Shelby Harris
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There's some debate as to whether you need to awaken from them because there are some patients who are actually starting to say, I had these horrible nightmares, but I never woke up from them. But they can still recall them when they get up in the morning. So there's still some debate in the field.
Shelby Harris
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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.
Shelby Harris
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People went to bed when the sun went down and they woke up when the sun came up. That's what our bodies are naturally programmed to do. However, with all the new stresses in life with electricity, with technology, we tend to override that system and we'll stay up later and we'll get up earlier or later, and we use alarm clocks, we use the light.
Shelby Harris
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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.
Shelby Harris