what is the sleep cycle?

[lilapple]

Can someone please explain to me the sleep cycle?  (I mean the amount of time a baby will be in each kind of sleep--I think it's 20 min light sleep then enter the deep sleep, right?  So that means the deep sleep is only 20 min since an entire cycle is 40 min?  What are the breathing patterns for each --is it heavy for light sleep and shallow breathing for heavy sleep?)  Knowing this will help me understand my lo better--thanks!

[Jaime]

it's more of a curve than a line.  think, mountain, valley, mountain (if you're a math/science geek like me it's like a cosine curve  :oops: )  basically, during that 20 minutes, the line curves down as the baby goes to sleep, then after the deepest part of sleep, the line curves back up until they're at the light sleep.  REM sleep is the very last part of that.  at the end of the REM cycle, (hopefully) they will begin to cycle back down into deep sleep.

breathing is much deeper & calmer in the heavy sleep.  lighter sleep is usuallly shallower. 

HTH