It’s usual to have several periods of this stage of sleep each night.

REM sleep happens about 70 – 90 minutes into your sleep cycle. Seizures when you’re awake can also reduce your REM sleep the following night. Your REM sleep is greatly reduced, and may even disappear. It makes your sleep lighter, and you wake up more often. If you have a seizure during your sleep, it affects your sleep for the rest of the night. Non-REM sleep (restorative sleep) is important for restoring normal brain functions. REM sleep is important because it’s when your brain processes your emotions, files your memories and relieves your stress. However, eating cheese too close to bedtime can give you indigestion, which may be the source of the myth.There are several different stages of sleep including rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep and non-rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep. Although this myth has done the rounds, proving more popular the younger you are, there’s actually no scientific evidence that cheese would give you nightmares. Interestingly, this is followed by ‘read yourself a bedtime story,’ with a 97% increase in searches following the demand for sleep apps, aiding sleep through a guided meditation or a soothing story.Īvoiding cheese for a good night’s sleep is the 5th most popular hack of the past 12 months with 3,300 searches on Google. The natural sleep saver helps reduce stress, relax muscles and kickstart the sleeping process. ‘ Lavender’ also proved popular, with the plant's relaxing powers used as early as the ancient Egyptians and Romans and now gaining 9720 searches in the past year and a 104% increase in the past year. The idea of wearing socks is that this improves blood circulation, helping blood flow and reducing your core body temperature faster - a process that is integral to falling asleep. But ‘wearing socks’ is the old wives' tale that saw the highest increase in interest, with a 463% rise in searches thanks to the hack trending on TikTok. ‘Beauty sleep’ a term originating in the Victorian era saw the highest search volumes of 198,000 over the past 12 months, with the idea continuing that your body uses the sleep hours for regeneration. History may have changed sleep, but old wives tales have stayed the same. How has sleep changed? Discovering 150 years of sleep

With people worrying about financial security, their health and spending more time indoors than before, it’s no surprise that their quality of sleep suffered. In a study by the NCBI, almost 1 in 3 individuals reported worse quality of sleep during lockdown than under normal conditions. With people working from home and no longer having to commute to work, we most likely decided to use the extra time in the morning to sleep in.Īlthough we slept longer, the public also found their sleep more disrupted than normal. Interestingly, the pandemic has seen us wake up later than usual, at 7:30am rather than the 7am of the Modern Age. All this taking a toll on the way we sleep by distributing our circadian rhythm and the cues that would typically aid sleep. Our social lives also took a hit, with summer evenings at the pub replaced with zoom quizzes and other at home activities.

During the pandemic many found themselves working from home and doing less daily activity with a maximum of just one hour of outside exercise a day.

Average wake up time uk