What's Better: Short, Deep Sleep Or Longer, Lighter Sleep?

We’ve all been there: Maybe you were frantically packing for a trip and only got a few solid hours of sleep before it was time to wake up. Or perhaps you went to bed at a decent hour but were so stressed about work you didn’t get restorative rest.

Whether you tend to lie half-awake in bed for seven hours or completely zonk out for a few short ones, you may wonder how these different sleeping patterns are affecting your health. What is better: a short, deep sleep or longer, lighter sleep?

Simply put, experts agree that it’s not as straightforward as aiming for one kind of slumber over the other.

“Neither short, deep sleep only nor long, light sleep only is sufficient to completely benefit from good restorative sleep,” Dr. Temitayo Oyegbile-Chidi, the chair of the National Sleep Foundation , told HuffPost. “All four stages of sleep are necessary for brain restoration.”

These four individual stages of sleep include N1and N2, which are considered “light sleep.” The third stage is N3, which is also referred to as deep sleep and slow-wave sleep. And lastly is rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep. Over the course of the evening, a person cycles through these stages an average of four to six times.

According to Carleara Weiss, a sleep scientist and research assistant professor at The State University of New York at Buffalo, light sleep reduces heart rate and respiration, lowers body temperature and relaxes muscles.

On the other hand, the deep-sleep stage helps to repair tissue , strengthen the immune system and facilitate cognitive development. REM sleep, when most dreaming occurs, plays a vital role in emotional processing and memory consolidation.

“The balance of all these stages allows for proper functioning the next day,