Significance of Stage 3 Sleep

[HalfAsleep]

Interestingly, my sleep study shows I had exactly 0 Stage 3 sleep. I slept for 6.3 hours (approximately) with 2 cycles.

Significance?


Also, does anyone know what "stage shifts" are? I had 114. Do you jump around to different stages while you're sleeping, or do the stages happen consecutively, as in Stage 1, Stage 2, Stage 3, and REM, and then start over?

[Melman]

I also had zero stage 3 or REM sleep. I d0n't believe that is terribly unusual in sleep studies due to the conditions and environment of the testing. It's hardly typical of the normal sleep environment.

[silversnore]

My sleep study also noted that I did not progress past stage 2 during my test.  Dreams happen while we are in rem sleep and I did not realize that I was not dreaming any more.  I was amazed how much I started dreaming after starting cpap due to getting to deeper sleep stages.  I'm with Melman, you don't sleep well in the lab, but we don't sleep well with OSA either!!

[Timur]

I've had two overnight in lab sleep studies. In the first one I had a very small amount of stage 3 sleep (1% of total sleep time I seem to recall), and about 20% REM sleep. Horrible sleep efficiency mainly due to Wake After Sleep Onset. (71%) Also 114 stage transitions, and a stage shift index of 20.4 ... which I suspect indicates that my sleep was pretty fragmented. No stage 3 during the second study.

[PaytonA]

Stage 3 and stage 4 sleep are very important because that is where the regenerative sleep occurs.

[Walla Walla]

Yup. Checked my sleep study and a big zero for stage 3.

[mrkdilkington]

I also had 0% SWS (S3/N3) on a sleep study + subsequent CPAP titration. It doesn't really mean anything, it turns out - just that your OSA is really bad in certain positions, and your body is very susceptible to arousal. Basically your [my] body will try to get SWS during roughly the first half of the night only (speaking in broad generality here, there are exceptions). As you pass this timeframe, your body will "give up" trying to get SWS and focus its efforts on getting stage REM sleep. Going back to the first half of the night, in order to get to SWS, you have to start in a light stage sleep and stay asleep long enough to transition into SWS. How long that transition takes depends on how much sleep debt you have (i.e. how sleep deprived you are). Now in my case, what happens is if I start to have respiratory events in light stage sleep, my body is essentially never able to reach SWS. According to a sleep endoscopy I did, the source of my OSA is isolated to tongue-base obstruction, which more-or-less only happens when I'm on my back, leading to complete obstruction. So when I do a sleep study and start by sleeping on my back, I am never able to enter SWS because I can't stay asleep long enough. Hence the 0% SWS. I use a Fitbit which uses heuristics to detect sleep stages and have confirmed these theories. I'm doing positional therapy at the moment and get plenty of SWS when I sleep on my side.