For years now, we’ve been told that the key to unlocking the health benefits associated with sleep lies in aiming for roughly eight hours of uninterrupted kip each night.

But thanks to the rise of slick wearables like the Oura ring, there’s now a complicated science to hacking our shuteye, with TikTokers experimenting with diet and lifestyle tweaks to try and incrementally nudge up their sleep score.

Recently, deep sleep, the most restorative stage of sleep, has been gaining attention as people look for ways to gamify their health. But what exactly is this type of sleep, how much do we need, and should we be trying to get more of it?

We asked Dr Guy Meadows, a leading sleep expert at The Sleep School, to lay out the facts.

What actually is deep sleep?

Before we get into the nitty gritty of your deepest sleep stage, let’s start by painting a picture of your sleep as a whole. “There are three sleep stages to know: light sleep, deep sleep and rapid eye movement,” explains Meadows. “Good quality sleep requires us to get all three types of sleep, repeated in a cyclical format, throughout the night.”

When you switch out the light and drift off, you initially fall into light sleep, a type of slumber that kickstarts a number of important biological processes. “Heart rate reduces, blood pressure drops, and your memories start to get consolidated,” notes Meadows, who adds that light sleep makes up 50% of the total rest we need.

When we eventually snore our way into deep sleep, we start to do most of our physical growth repair, which is part of the reason why it’s gained so much attention.

This type of total-knockout rest not only helps us to feel refreshed and renewed, but it also encourages a “big spike in growth hormone, making it great for growing and repairing muscles, supporting immune function and keeping our metabolism ticking over,” says Meadow.

Should we be striving for more deep sleep then?

Thanks to the rise of a trend called Sleepmaxxing, where TikTok users play around with different lifestyle and diet interventions to try and ‘hack’ their deep sleep, you’re probably wondering if you should be aiming to get more of this type of rest?

If you’re already averaging eight hours of sleep every night, the answer is likely no, according to Meadows. “I get lots of clients asking me how they can achieve a 100% deep sleep score on their wearable, but this is pretty much impossible, as deep sleep should only account for roughly 20% of your night.”

He continues: “If you were to look at deep sleep on an EEG, it’d be characterised by wonderful, rolling delta waves, a similar shape to the Devonshire Hills. Light sleep, meanwhile, manifests as short, sharp, spikey bits of EEG, which don’t look particularly restorative and relaxed.”

But here’s the thing: both sleep stages are equally important, and if we want to reap all the recovery benefits of sleep, we need to strike a balance of the two.

“REM sleep, another type of light sleep, is the stage where we typically dream, making it a powerhouse of memory consolidation and emotional process,” Meadows explains. “It’s fundamentally important and therefore should account for up to 30% of our night. So when we talk about good quality sleep, we want to get all three of these types of sleep repeatedly throughout the night.”

Instead of aiming for a high percentage of deep sleep, Meadows instead stresses that we should be striving for “four or five quality cycles of all the sleep stages” each evening. If this sounds confusing, don’t stress, as simply aiming to get eight hours of shut eye per night is the best thing we can do to encourage this autonomic sleep rotation.

Dr Guy Meadows’ 3 golden rules for better slumber

Break up with your wearable

Tracking your zzzzs can be a cool way of learning more about your health, but it can also tip you over into sleep anxiety.

“I’m a huge fan of sleep tracking, as it’s helped lots of people become more aware of the relationship between stress and alcohol and their sleep,” says Meadows. “But I’ve also witnessed the negative side, where chronic insomnia can be fuelled by a new type of sleep disorder called orthoinsomnia; the pursuit of a perfect sleep score.”

If you’re regularly stressing about your morning Apple Watch report, Meadows says it might be better to slip off your band and unplug from the data.

Quit the midnight scroll

One of the most appealing aspects of bumping up your deep sleep score is the idea that getting more of it might mean you can stay up later, wake up earlier, and still feel well-rested.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. “A lot of people suffer from social jet lag these days,” warns Meadows. “It’s the dullest piece of sleep advice out there, but going to bed and getting up at the same time every night is the best thing we can do to feel consistently refreshed.

“The rationale is that having a bedtime keeps your internal body clock in a regular rhythm, which keeps every biological process working on time, including all of the hormones that regulate your appetite and growth repair.” If you struggle with regularity, a magensium-based sleep supplement, like Form’s ZZZZs, may help to support quality sleep.

Lean into your natural sleep habits

Social media has, by and large, equated waking up early with higher levels of productivity, with many influencers extolling the benefits of being part of elusive ‘5am club’. But if you struggle to peel yourself out of bed before sunrise, Meadows says this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“A slightly geeky sleep tip is to lean into your chronotype – the influence of your genetics on your sleep timing,” explains Meadows. “Some of us appear to be morning types, while others are naturally more alert in the evening. This makes total evolutionary sense when you consider that at one point, humans needed to stay awake in shifts to protect their tribe from danger.”

Basically, your body has a natural inclination to sleep at a certain time, and if you’re a genetically-coded night owl, it may be more beneficial to hit the hay when you’re feeling sleepy, rather than forcing a strict 9pm bedtime.

That said, there are limitations here, and you should still aim to sleep within sociable hours. If you’re staying up past midnight, scrolling on social media and telling yourself you’re not a good sleeper, you’re likely to wind up feeling more tired, groggy and sleep deprived than you actually need to be.

The post No, You Probably Don’t Need to Be Getting More Deep Sleep – Here’s Why appeared first on Form.