If you are resting with your eyes closed, but not fully "sleeping," what benefits of sleep do you get?
As others have mentioned, we don't have any proven health benefits to dozing with a very active mind. We do have studies on meditation, which would be better defined as a mind focused on relaxation while your eyes are closed. Usually for my insomniacs I recommend meditation, not dozing. A randomized controlled trial of mindfulness meditation for chronic insomnia.The question is really why you are dozing rather than sleeping. Napping certainly has health benefits. The Sweet Science of Dozing But the benefits can be offset depending on what you want to do once you wake up. For those who need to be vigilant immediately upon waking, meditation may be a better choice than a nap. Meditation acutely improves psychomotor vigilance, and may decrease sleep need. (Meditation does not replace a night's sleep and losing a night slows response times). If you are looking for insight, dozing may be detrimental. Researchers have found that: "Both non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep have been implicated with offline re-activation and reorganization of memories supporting explicit knowledge generation...individual ability of explicit knowledge generation was strongly associated with increased rate of transitions between NREM and REM sleep stages and between light sleep stages and slow wave sleep. However, the rate of NREM-REM transitions specifically predicted the amount of explicit knowledge after sleep" Labile sleep promotes awareness of abstract knowledge in a serial reaction time task. In layman's terms, sleep is when your brain reboots and upgrades your software (wetware). Dozing is like having your screensaver on. It's helpful only if you are running a background program like practicing focused breathing as part of a meditation exercise.
Why do I sometimes feel very rested after 6 hours of sleep, but other times I feel very tired after 6 hours as well?
One of the simplest explanations has to do with when you wake up in relation to your sleep cycle. I’m a former polysomnography technician, so I know a bit about sleep. If we could develop a non-invasive method of monitoring a person’s sleep, then we would be much better off. You could set a desired time to wake up along with a maximum and a minimum time, and your alarm could wake you when you were at the optimum point in your sleep cycle within that time frame. Perhaps you wanted to wake up at 7:30am, but you had to be up by 7:45am at the latest. You could put that into your alarm, and you might be woken up at 7:20am or 7:40am for an example. We stage sleep from stage 0 which means awake all the way to stage 4. The ideal time to be woken up would be in stage 1 or 2. We cycle through these stages while we sleep. If your alarm were to go off while you were in stage 3 or 4 sleep, then you’d likely feel quite groggy. That feeling will likely persist for quite some time after you wake. Waking up from stage 1 or 2 in contrast usually results in a feeling of being rested and awake. There are definitely other factors that can affect how you feel when you wake up regardless of stage, but this is a big one.
I absolutely cannot sleep!!!?
this really helps me. 1. clear your mind COMPLETELY 2. on your bed, imagine you're floating on a cloud 3. lift one of your arms up, and pretend to sprinkle sparkles on yourself 4. imagine sparkles being sprinkled on yourself 5. put your arm down as youre falling asleep hope i helped :)
Why do I feel rested after only just two hours of sleep?
Why, yes you did! And you spent almost all of it in the best kind of sleep, the most restful kind of sleep! That's why you woke up and felt so amazing, instead of coma-induced tired. Most of us sleep in cycles which go from Level I (the lightest, most useless type) to Level IV (the good stuff), then on to REM. Then we come out of REM and move on to a new sleep cycle. Depending on the person, these cycles take about two hours in the beginning, before steadily decreasing in time. You most likely wake up in the middle of Stage III sleep, which is when you are way deep under, but not fully rested yet. This is why you are incredibly groggy. Giving yourself an extra hour will most likely result in the completion of that sleep cycle and alertness upon waking up. But, wait. How does going to sleep for only two hours actually feel better? That's because you were so sleep deprived you immediately went through Stages I-III in the first couple of minutes and spent the rest in Stage IV and REM. Since this was the only sleep cycle you went through (and the initial one takes about two hours to complete), you finished one complete cycle and woke up refreshed. So, now. This begs the following question, doesn't it? What if I only sleep two hours a day? I'd wake up feeling refreshed and ready to go, right? Unfortunately, 99.99% of the time, this is not the case. A single sleep cycle is good for a couple of hours of high-functioning life. Perhaps 3-5 hours. After that, you'd need another nap before going again. Kind of like giving a car only one gallon of gas to completely burn. It may be great gas that cleans out the engine, but it only lasts so long. Taking all your sleep in one chunk instead of falling over at lunch for a nap is most likely more suitable for the average person (who has school, work, etc.). If you're interested in reading more, Google the Uberman sleep schedule, a rather ridiculous schedule of carefully-timed naps aiming to increase restorative (good stuff) sleep and decrease the supposedly useless earlier stage sleep. We do, actually, need these earlier stages. You can't immediately jump to Stage IV without being prepared through the earlier stages first.