Many people often wake up at 3 a.m. If they are mentally unwell, it may be difficult to fall back asleep, and the cause is the sleep cycle that causes this phenomenon.
Many people often wake up at 3 a.m. and have difficulty falling back asleep. Image: Marcos Mesa Sam Wordley/Shutterstock
During the course of a night, people go through several sleep cycles. Each cycle begins with light sleep, then transitions to deeper sleep as we enter slow-wave sleep. This is followed by a more active period called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, after which you will most likely wake up before going back to sleep.
The whole process takes about 4 hours, which means if you usually go to bed around 11pm, you’ll find yourself awake again around 3am. To not have your sleep interrupted and be fully awake again, the best way is not to let yourself fall into a spiral of negative thoughts.
Studies show that people tend to be less rational in their thoughts at night than during the day, which is why problems always seem much more difficult at 3 a.m.
Professor Greg Murray, Director of the Center for Mental Health at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, in a 2021 article on The Conversation, said that waking up at 3am is not a good habit to maintain.
According to sleep experts, the reason is that early morning thoughts are related to stress, although not directly. Stress doesn’t make us wake up more at night, Murray explains, but it does make us more aware of it.
According to Colin Espie, professor of sleep medicine at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, when people wake up at night, what comes to mind is often something that happened the day before. before or something that will happen the next day. Therefore, “making a to-do list can help your brain proactively handle things without waking you up,” he said.
Theo Nature Neurosciencesleep that is too short and not deep causes a protein that causes memory loss (beta amyloid protein) to accumulate in the brain. Gradually, high levels of beta-amyloid protein will cause sleep disorders. So insomnia not only affects your memory the next day but also increases the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
Previous studies have also shown that deep sleep clears beta amyloid in the brain. Lack of sleep will prevent the process of purifying this substance, causing memory to get worse. Therefore, researchers recommend planning work, nutrition, exercise… so that sleep is not interrupted.