What makes someone a light sleeper?
For some people, the slightest noise awakens them at night. For others, the wailing siren of a passing fire truck doesn’t disturb their slumber. Just why, though, remains a bit of a mystery. Although many people are self-proclaimed light sleepers or heavy sleepers, researchers have found that little is actually known about why people react differently to noises and other stimuli during sleep. Genetics, lifestyle choices, and undiagnosed sleep disorders may all play a role. In addition, some studies suggest that differences in brainwave activity during sleep may also make someone a light or heavy sleeper.
Light and Deep Sleep During sleep, you alternate between cycles of REM (rapid eye movement) and NREM (non-rapid eye movement) that repeat about every 90 minutes. You spend about 75 percent of the night in NREM sleep, which consists of four stages of increasing relaxation.
Stage one, or the phase between being awake and asleep, is considered light sleep.
Deeper sleep begins in stage two, as your breathing and heart rate become regular and your body temperature drops.
Stages three and four are the deepest and most restorative stages of sleep, in which breathing slows, muscles relax, and tissue growth and repair occurs.
Someone who gets eight hours of sleep a night may not experience as much slow-wave, deep sleep as the person who get six hours of sleep.
What Contributes to Light Sleep?
A small study, published in 2010 in Current Biology, suggests that differences in how sleeping people respond to noise may be related to levels of brain activity called sleep spindles. The researchers found that people whose brains produced the most of these high-frequency sleep spindles were more likely to sleep through loud noises. But more research is needed to confirm the results. Dr. Neubauer said that if someone is complaining of not feeling rested because of being a light sleeper, they should look at the factors that might be contributing to the inability to achieve a deep sleep.
Now, for the first time, sleep researchers at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, led by neurologist Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen, have isolated the brain-wave pattern that predicts where an individual's brain has struck a balance between those demands — a window into how likely noises are to wake people from deep sleep.
For the three-night study, Ellenbogen's group invited 12 volunteers who reported being deep and healthy sleepers into a sleep lab with a comfy queen-size bed outfitted with enormous speakers at the headboard. The researchers recorded the participants' brain waves as they slept normally the first night, and then on subsequent nights as they were bombarded with 14 different noises — from the din of car traffic and the roar of airplane engines to flushing toilets and slamming doors — which were played at progressively louder volumes.
Ellenbogen paid particular attention to the patterns generated by the thalamus, a region deep in the brain that processes incoming visual and auditory stimuli. He found that the number of pulses, known as sleep spindles, generated by this organ and measured by an electroencephalogram (EEG), which records electrical activity in the brain, varied among the sleepers. Those with the highest number of spindles were able to sleep through more sounds without waking than those whose brains showed fewer spindles. "We wanted to know, if we counted the spindles the first night, did that predict anything about their subsequent sleep?" says Ellenbogen. "And indeed it did. More spindles meant they were more likely to be protected from sleep disruption."
How newmindcentre.com can help you?
1) Neuro-Hypnotherapy:
Doctors at Harvard University found that hypnotherapy actually promotes faster healing. Get hypnotized. Many insomniacs have tried this with great success. Under hypnosis, you might work out any personal issues that are robbing you of sleep. A clinical hypnotherapist can also "program" you to sleep. Our neuro-hypnotherapy technique able to help you! Personalized self-hypnosis method to fall asleep will be developed based on your brainwave response.
2) EEG biofeedback therapy/Neurotherapy
EEG biofeedback/Neurotherapy is based on the international standardized 10-20 electrode location system. it is essentially a way of teaching you how to self-regulate your own electrical activity in the brain. A powerful tool for helping people fall asleep and stay asleep. Over 3,000 licensed health professionals such as psychologists, therapists, and doctors now use this new technology daily with patients. As a group, they report significant and consistent improvements for client sleep problems.
Call to schedule an appointment to meet me.
Based on your condition, I can help you to find the cause and suggest appropriate treatment.
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Source:
http://www.ehow.com/how_7828707_cure-light-sleeping.html
http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2009401,00.html
http://www.clearmindofcolorado.com/research-on-sleep-disorders/
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