I am back from a short study on sleep cycles. I have found them to be immensely interesting. While writing this post, I must admit I am already a bit sleepy. To explain  some of my findings there are 2 types of sleep: REM and non-REM. In the non-REM first is obviously stage 1. Stage 1 tends to last about five minutes or so and is the relaxing drifting into sleep stage. Next is stage 2, this is where some sleep actually begins, the body winds down eye movement stops, heart rate slows, and body temperature decreases. Stage 3 is deep sleep.This one restores your physical energy, if you wake up from this one you'll feel groggy for maybe 7 or 8 minutes. Then about 70 minutes into the cycle comes REM. The REM can be said to restore your mental energy, effecting what you retain from the day before and reaction time. REM also makes and balances out all the chemicals properly to make sure you can maintain a pleasant mood.

Further explanation can be found at http://www.helpguide.org/life/sleeping.htm. As a quick wrap up:

• When you have sleep debt, often your REM will be sacrificed for your bodies proper care for the deep sleep.
• Sleeping weekends are not enough, if you want lasting effects. You may sleep away the weekend and feel fine Monday morning, but likely this won't last the week; maybe not even the afternoon.

This last bullet reinforces the consistency point. Your body can only adjust to perhaps a hour or two time difference per night, skip all the constant readjustments and find one that generally works for you any day (work week or weekend). Now for favorite discovery worth repeating  before bed tonight is that all this tends to take around 90 minutes then is repeated. This is good to know because more sleep doesn't necessarily mean better remember? This is to say that waking up at the end of a sleep cycle at 5:30 A.M might produce more lasting energy than waking up at 6:20 A.M that same morning. How can we use this knowledge? Count in multiples of 90 from your bedtime, wake at the end of a sleep cycle (make sure you have enough sleep cycles in your sleep session) and you'll likely meet more favorable results.