what is deep sleep

Credit to fellow Carsen Wendt blogger doing this research (full article at link).

What happens during deep sleep?

During deep sleep, all energy goes into recharging your batteries: Your kidneys clean your blood, your organs detoxicate, cells are replaced, wounds heal, muscle tissue builds up. Moreover, you consolidate your memories.Get too little deep sleep and your immune system weakens. Over the long run you may suffer fatigue, apathy and even depression.

Sounds like I want to get enough of that. But how much should it be?

Here’s a surprise: a healthy dose of deep sleep is about 20% of overall sleep. That’s less than I thought.

If this is the case, then even my worst night with 30% would be way above the norm. If we only had three phases, I needn’t worry. But there’s a fourth phase and this is where things get interesting:

Phase 4 (REM sleep):

In REM-sleep the brain gets active again. It’s as active as during the day: we dream intensively during this phase.

It’s not exactly known what REM-sleep does for us but it seems to play a key role in storing memories and balancing our moods – nothing I’d want to tinker with. And 25% of overall sleep is the healthy norm.

But where does it count? Does the Jawbone Up register REM as deep or light sleep?

REM is a paradoxical phase. The name stands for Rapid Eye Movement: our brain is active and our eyes are too. But our limbs are not. We secrete hormones that effectively put us in a narcotic state: like in deep sleep, our body lies still!

So way off..7.5 hours as normal for adult & 20% for deepsleep. Not even going into calculating REM sleep.

Current : 6hr to 5hr 45min average ;   Deepsleep: ~1hr 25min