okay so a couple of you mentioned um being confused about the order of stages in sleep um and a lot of you said that the uh the the brain waves are really confusing listen don't worry about the brain waves i'm not concerned that you know the differences in names for all the brain waves um it's an open book open notes kind of test right um don't worry so much about uh remembering that this one is a beta wave and this one is a theta wave what i'm concerned that you understand is that as we get deeper into sleep our brain waves change they slow down a whole bunch and they get um they get larger in um in amplitude which means that the wave just gets bigger okay so when we're awake our brain waves are really really zigzaggy and very tiny and when we're um relaxing and going towards sleep and the deeper sleep we get they get really big and really slow that's what i want you to understand okay and then the other thing that i really want you to understand that's important is that rem sleep looks really different that rem sleep looks a lot more like being awake than it does being asleep because we've got so much happening in our brains during rem sleep so so make sure you understand that um as far as sleep stages we've got three stages of what we call non-rem or n-rem sleep um and that's basically stage one which is really light stage two which is deeper and stage three or um or slow wave sleep is sometimes what it's called as well um and that's really deep sleep sometimes you see a stage four there's not really an exact science to some of this um so what we call slow wave sleep you'll sometimes see a stage three and stage four don't worry about that what you need to know is that we basically have three levels of sleep one is really shallow one is in the middle and one is really really deep and if we're in that really deep stage of sleep that's really good for us but we're also really hard to wake up okay and then much more shallow on the other side is that rem stage okay rem sleep and rem sleep is where dreams happen in rem sleep our brain is absolutely active it's super aware it's um it's very alert to what's happening inside the brain it's not alert to the outside world obviously we're still sleeping but there's a lot of activity it looks like we're awake as far as our brain waves go but we're asleep and in theory mostly paralyzed or at least we should be um and so that's why that's why rem sleep is so unusual because we are paralyzed at the same time that we are super active internally so um so just remember that we've got that shallow level of sleep and we're just falling asleep and that's stage one and then stage two is a little deeper and then stage three or um slow wave sleep is that deepest level of sleep when we're getting really really good deep sleep and then we go back towards the shallow side with rem sleep before kind of repeating the cycle over and over again but remember that not every stage repeats in every 90 minute cycle right remember that chart that kind of showed that towards the first half of the night we tend to go a lot deeper and then towards the second half of the night we don't go down as deep but we tend to spend more time in rem and all that makes sense because we want to kind of prepare our bodies for waking up towards the second half of sleep so we get shallower which is why a lot of times we wind up waking up out of a dream um but then towards the first half of sleep we're getting that really really deep um restorative sleep that's so important okay so hopefully that helps to clear up those questions about um about the sleep stages and the the cycles and all of that kind of stuff