![]() ![]() While there is no simple formula for boosting the amount of time you spend in any of the stages of sleep, there are behaviors you can adopt to give yourself the best chance at an efficient night of sleep. Tips for Getting Great Sleep & Improving Sleep Cycles Looking for patterns like this can help you build routines that maximize your WHOOP recovery and improve your heart rate variability, one of the key metrics for determining your body’s readiness to perform each day. Here, it appears that the athlete got less than his or her average total amount of sleep on those nights and, on 2 of the 3 occasions, the sleep was following a very high strain day. This is a healthy ratio, but if the athlete hopes to investigate behaviors that could contribute to this trend it would be appropriate to select Jan 31, Feb 9, and Feb 10 to see if anything stands out. Measured against the average total time in bed, this means that 18% of their sleep is spent in the SWS stage. For this athlete, a drinking event preceding each low REM sleep seems to be the common thread (here’s a deep dive into how alcohol affects your sleep).įor SWS, this athlete is getting 1 hour and 43 minutes a night. To assess a root cause, the athlete might look at the night statistics from Feb 3, 4, 5, and 11 pictured in the bar graph above. This is 13% of the total time in bed, glaringly low in comparison to the goal of roughly 22% each night. However, the ratio of time spent in REM and SWS shows where this athlete is coming up short:įor REM, the athlete is getting 1 hour and 16 minutes on average per night. When looking at the 2-week average breakdown below, we see plenty of time in bed. Here’s an example of one WHOOP athlete’s data: The long-term sleep trends accessible on the WHOOP web app ( ) give you the opportunity to unpack nighttime habits that either help or hurt your sleep efficiency. While they only last a few minutes and you’re not conscious of them, you can lose upwards of an hour of sleep in the Wake stage due to disturbances.Īnalyzing Sleep Stages & Trends with WHOOP: Slow Wave Sleep vs REM ![]() These periods are known as arousals, or “disturbances” in the WHOOP app, and it is normal to experience anywhere from 10-20 per night. Wake is included as a sleep stage because it is natural to be awake for brief periods many times in the night. As it relates to an athlete, any time you are practicing a technical skill, the actual consolidation and retention of that learning happens during REM sleep. It is at this time that ideas and skills acquired during the day are cemented as memories. As an athlete, training sessions break down muscle tissue so that it can rebuild and grow during slow wave sleep. During this stage the body produces 95% of its daily supply of growth hormones. ![]() ![]() Slow Wave Sleep (SWS), also known as deep sleep, is the time when your muscles repair and grow. In fact, there is a theory that light sleep exists to allow the body to be aware of its surroundings and to wake quickly in the event of a threat. Some of the restorative characteristics that define deep sleep occur in this phase, but with less frequency, as your body is more responsive to your environment in light sleep. Light sleep represents the physiological process taken to transition to deep sleep. Stages of Sleep: Light, Slow Wave Sleep (SWS), REM, Wake ![]()
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