KEIKO Beauty column by Keiko Iwanaga, a beautician with over 40 years of experience. Collaboration with Dr.Oike opens a new frontier of beauty.

1-40. The Chemistry of Sleep

People today are in trouble with tons of information and stress, making it difficult to get a healthy sleep.

Recently there have been an increasing number of articles about sleep on various journals.

“Sleep is more about quality than length.”

“Sleep when you’re sleepy.”

There is a wide range of advice on sleep.

“Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams”, which was published in the US in 2017 and became a best-seller, is about the power of sleep.

Matthew Walker, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies sleep, summarizes the results of his previous research.

In it, he described how to improve the quality of sleep.

First, sleep researchers recommend eight hours of sleep.

The reason for this is that the ratio of REM and non-REM sleep changes at the beginning (late night) and end (early morning) of sleep.

REM sleep is a dreaming state and non-REM sleep is a state in which the brain is resting, and the brain repeats this cycle while you sleep.

Studies show that the closer morning, the percentage of REM sleep is increased.

Therefore, the dreams you remember when you wake up are the dreams you were having just before you woke up.

In order to balance this REM and non-REM sleep, you have to sleep for 7-8 hours.

That’s why, Dr. Walker says, “Eight hours of sleep is necessary.”

There are many negative effects that lack of sleep can have on the body and mind, and usually you’re barely aware of them.

He warns against getting less than six hours of sleep because “sleeping in batches later doesn’t cancel out the fatigue.”

As a perpetual insomniac, this is very serious facts for me, too…

We want to be conscious of our daily sleep so that we don’t let the accumulation of a lack of sleep in our lives destroy our bodies.

In next article, I’ll introduce the basic rules of good sleep as recommended by sleep researchers…

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Let’s learn sleep mechanism to improve the quality of our sleep!

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