How to learn to sleep in a short time

For good health and well-being, prop­er sleep is a must. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, with the mod­ern rhythm of life, it is not always pos­si­ble to ensure a good night’s rest.

It used to be thought that a full sleep should last about eight hours. So every­one has to spend almost a third of the day in bed? It’s not oblig­a­tory. There are spe­cial tech­niques that allow you to ful­ly restore strength in a short­er time.

Sleep phases

Before you begin to study the meth­ods of accel­er­at­ed sleep, you should get acquaint­ed with its struc­ture. Sleep con­sists of two phas­es: REM and non-REM sleep. Each of these phas­es is nec­es­sary to main­tain a full life and a com­plete rejec­tion of one of them can lead to unpleas­ant con­se­quences.

In the phase of REM sleep (“rapid eye move­ments”), which lasts about 20 min­utes, recov­ery and opti­miza­tion of brain func­tions occurs. Dur­ing this peri­od, the brain process­es all the infor­ma­tion received dur­ing the day. It is dur­ing REM sleep that a per­son sees dreams that are prod­ucts of his own brain.

Dur­ing slow sleep, the entire body is restored as a whole. In this phase, the hor­mon­al and immune sta­tus­es are cor­rect­ed, leuko­cytes and inter­leukins are formed that pro­tect the body from infec­tions, skin cells and the gas­troin­testi­nal tract are active­ly restored. The absence of this phase can lead to fre­quent viral and colds, dis­eases of the car­dio­vas­cu­lar and endocrine sys­tems. If you wake up a per­son in the phase of slow sleep, then he will feel tired, sleepy and lethar­gic.

How to sleep less and stay healthy?

A short nap can also become ful­fill­ing if orga­nized wise­ly. There are sev­er­al tech­niques based on reduc­ing sleep time due to the slow phase:

• The Sies­ta sys­tem involves the orga­ni­za­tion of a short day­time sleep and a long night­time sleep. Day­time sleep should last no more than 20 min­utes — dur­ing this time the brain will have time to recov­er and, as a result, the time of night rest will be reduced by a cou­ple of hours;
• lad­der sys­tem. The prin­ci­ple of this sys­tem is sim­i­lar to “Sies­ta”, but there should be sev­er­al ses­sions of day­time sleep. So, if you want to reduce sleep at night by 4 hours, you need to arrange two twen­ty-minute sleep ses­sions dur­ing the day;
• The “super­hu­man” method of sleep involves reduc­ing the night’s rest by sev­er­al short ses­sions of sleep dur­ing the day. This tech­nique is very dif­fi­cult for the body, it can­not be used for a long time due to the dan­ger of symp­toms of ner­vous over­work;
• the use of spe­cial alarm clocks and appli­ca­tions that con­trol sleep phas­es. Today, a huge num­ber of “helpers” have appeared that will help you wake up at the end of REM sleep. Their use is absolute­ly harm­less and is an excel­lent pre­ven­tion of chron­ic fatigue.

What happens to us during sleep. How to sleep to sleep