We often get asked, “How do I increase my deep sleep? What can I do to spend more time specifically in the deep, relaxing, recovery-inducing stage of sleep?”
Deep sleep is critical for a healthy body, and it plays a central role in your daily energy levels, mental abilities, even your ability to recover after intense exercise or an injury.
Below, we’re going to look at the question “How do I increase my deep sleep?” and give you a few simple steps that will ensure you spend more time in the deeper stages of sleep every night.
How Do I Increase My Deep Sleep? Understanding Deep Sleep
What you know as “deep sleep” is actually called Stage 3 and Stage 4 of standard sleep (or sometimes just Stage 3). Stages 1 and 2 are light sleep, but once you reach Stage 3, you’re officially in “deep sleep”. This is characterized by slow brain waves with a high amplitude and a frequency of 1 Hz. The neurons in your neocortex are silent at first, allowing that critical part of your brain to rest, but transition to a rapid-firing state that leads into REM sleep. During deep sleep, there is minimal or no eye movement, your muscles are relaxed, and there is no genital activity (an important indicator of sleep, it turns out).
Deep sleep, also known as “slow wave sleep”, is when your memories are consolidated, your body and brain are able to make repairs to any damaged cells, and critical hormones are secreted to encourage cellular growth around the body.
How Do I Increase My Deep Sleep? 4 Simple Steps that Work
There are a few things you can do every day to encourage better sleep quality and help your brain spend more time in the deep sleep stages every night:
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Exercise. Exercise during the day is critical for better sleep quality. Not only does it burn through your body’s available energy supply, but it inflicts microscopic damage on your muscles and bones that the body needs to repair overnight. Intense prolonged physical exercise also leads to an elevated temperature in your brain, a factor that has been proven crucial for increasing deep sleep. Anything vigorous that you can sustain for a long period of time—such as jogging, rowing, cycling, calisthenics, or swimming—can do wonders to increase your fatigue and lengthen the amount of time you spend in the deep sleep stages every night.
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Soak in a hot tub or steam in a sauna. As previously mentioned, elevated temperature in your brain is believed to be a contributing factor to spending more time in slow-wave sleep. After your workout, spend a few minutes basking in a sauna, letting the steam raise your brain temperature and loosening your stiff muscles. You’ll find that when it comes time for bed, you’ll sleep much better. You can also soak in a hot tub before bed, where the heat of the water will also work to raise your brain’s internal temperature and encourage more time spent in slow-wave sleep.
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Cut carbs. This is a trick you can try a few days every week in order to improve your circadian rhythms and increase the time spent in deep sleep. The Sleep Association states that “An unusually low, short-term carbohydrate diet in healthy sleepers promotes an increase in the percentage of slow-wave sleep. This includes a production in the percentage of dreaming sleep (REM sleep), when compared to the control with a mixed diet.” It’s believed to be connected to the body’s natural metabolic functions, breaking down the nutrients in a high-fat vs. high-carbohydrate diet. However, consistently cutting out carbohydrates can have negative long-term repercussions for your health and metabolism, so it’s good to only do it occasionally.
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Sleep more. This is probably the single most crucial factor for increasing your slow-wave sleep. Your natural circadian rhythms are trained to progress through the various stages of sleep in the “sleep cycle”, moving from light sleep to deep sleep to REM sleep and back again. It’s estimated that the average adult spends roughly 13-23% of their total sleep time in deep sleep. The easiest way to increase the deep sleep time is to increase your sleep time overall. 13% of 6 hours of sleep is significantly lower than 13% of 8 or 9 hours of sleep. If you’re prone to sleep deprivation or sleep loss—due to your busy schedule or sleep difficulties—you’ll find that spending more time in sleep overall can not only increase deep sleep time, but improve your health in many, many ways!
To Increase Deep Sleep, Try PureSleep!
If you’re serious about increasing the time you spend in deep sleep, you’d do well to consider PureSleep.
PureSleep is an all-natural and organic sleep aid that will increase not only your total sleep time, but also make it easier to fall asleep and stay asleep throughout the night with fewer sleep disturbances. It’s made using the best herbal sleeping remedies on the planet, some of which have been utilized for thousands of years.
You get the power of ingredients like magnolia bark extract, magnesium, Ashwagandha, melatonin, Valerian root, and Griffonia Simplicifolia seed extract to help you sleep better every night. You’ll slip into sleep faster, sleep more deeply, and wake up less and less, until you find you’re sleeping the whole night through. When morning comes, you’ll awaken refreshed and ready for another busy day. That’s the PureSleep promise!
Take a look at the PureSleep page and see the scientific proof behind this supplement for yourself. You’ll see that it’s backed by cold, hard data, and the testimonials from satisfied customers will prove that it’s the answer to the question, “How do I increase my deep sleep naturally?”
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