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Our brains are not inactive while we sleep.

Sleep is composed of four different sleep stages, each with unique brain wave patterns and health benefits.

Protecting seven to nine hours of sleep per night will help your brain cycle through all of the sleep stages.

Have you ever wondered what happens to your brain while you sleep? Could it be that your brain turns off just as the rest of your body shuts down for the night? For quite some time, scientists and physicians believed that to be the case. But this view changed with the invention of the electroencephalogram, or EEG, a device that records our brain’s electrical activity. In the 1920s and 1930s, when scientists first recorded the sleeping brain using EEG, they were shocked to discover that the brain was anything but quiet at night. Rather, the brain was considerably busy, cycling through distinct patterns of activity. Today, we know that sleep is anything but a passive process; instead, it’s composed of carefully orchestrated sleep stages, each with its own unique brain-wave patterns and health implications.

The sleeping brain in cycles

Typically, our sleep is composed of repeated sleep cycles that last between 90 and 120 minutes. Most of us cycle through four to six of these cycles per night. Physicians can watch this pattern in real time while a patient undergoes an overnight sleep study (polysomnogram), which records brain wave patterns, eye movements, heart activity, breathing patterns, and muscle tone.

With the advent of EEG monitoring, sleep was divided into two main categories: non-REM sleep/non-rapid-eye-movement sleep (further........

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