Dr Sutapa Mukherjee

You're probably aware of this, that you usually can't fall asleep straight away when you jump into bed.

So there is a time which is different for everybody, but it takes a good half an hour for a lot of people to wind down.

So it kind of depends.

Getting ready for a good night's sleep really starts...

in the evening and most people are trying to fall asleep during nighttime hours so that beginning of withdrawing from the world starts even before you get into bed and so you know we've all got little rituals that that help to tell our bodies that we're getting ready for sleep and part of that is trying to reduce stimulation and some some people dim the lights um

A lot of people hopefully switch off their phones.

And then you finally get into bed.

And as I said, you don't usually fall asleep immediately.

Even then it might take 10, 15, 20 minutes for your brain to start to really relax.

And what's happening as you go into that first stage of sleep is your brainwaves are actually slowing down.

So one of the things that we do as sleep physicians and doctors

sleep researchers is we're constantly looking at the brainwaves because that really tells us when you're awake and when you're asleep and also what stage of sleep you're in.

So your brainwaves start to slow down.

What actually happens when we look at the EEG or the electroencephalogram is we can see sleep starts to intrude on wakefulness.

So we start to see a little bit of sleep and then people kind of

go back into the more alpha waves, which are characteristic of wakefulness.

And as you go off to sleep, you start to see more and more sleep appearing.

And then you actually are asleep.

And you go into stage one sleep, which is light sleep.

And you can't just go from stage one to REM sleep, which is dreaming sleep.