The Stages of Sleep

Sleep begins with NREM sleep, progressing through the three basic NREM sleep stages, sleep stages 1 and 2 and slow wave sleep. NREM sleep is then followed by a relatively short REM sleep episode. The time between falling asleep and the end of the REM episode constitutes a sleep cycle.

NREM Sleep

Stage 1
Sleep is very light sleep and it occurs during transitions from awake to asleep. Your muscle tone begins to decrease during this stage but slow eye movement continues. Most people don’t even notice that they’re sleeping at this point.

Stage 2 
During this stage of sleep, eye movements stop, and brain waves slow—with intermittent rapid wave bursts called “sleep spindles”. Most people when woken-up from stage 2 sleep realize that they were sleeping. If you’ve ever woken someone up during this stage, you probably noticed that the person slowly opened their eyes, looked around confusedly, and then went back to sleep.

Stages 3 and 4 (slow-wave sleep) 
In these stages brain waves slow further to a pattern called “delta waves” mixed with occasional spurts of faster waves. Heart rate and body temperature continue to drop, along with blood pressure and muscle tone. Eye movements remain absent. This is the deepest most restorative stage of sleep. If your alarm clock goes off during slow-wave sleep, you may feel confused and groggy for several minutes after waking up.

REM Sleep

This is when you do most of your dreaming, and is a time when your brain is actively encoding lessons that you learned and memories that you made throughout the day. Some people have called this type of sleep “paradoxical sleep” because it involves relatively fast brain activity and irregular heart rate and blood pressure, as well as characteristic rapid eye movements. During REM sleep your limbs are temporarily paralyzed, perhaps to keep your body from acting out action packed dreams.

Your sleep progresses through these cycles of NREM and REM sleep about every 90 minutes. Your brain engages in most slow wave sleep earlier in the night, which will ensure you get enough of this most restorative sleep state even if you cut your night short by an early morning meeting. If this happens to be the case, just remember that you can always catch up on sleep with a short nap during the day!

- StanfordOnline SOM, Staying Fit

Cognitive Distortions

Cognitive behavioral therapy was developed in the 1960s by Aaron Beck, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania. At the time, Freudian ideas dominated psychiatry. Clinicians assumed that depression and the distorted thinking it produces were just the surface manifestation of deeper problems, usually stretching back to unresolved childhood conflict. To treat depression, you had to fix the underlying problem, and that could take many years of therapy. But Beck saw a close connection between the thoughts a person had and the feelings that came with them. He noticed that his patients tended to get themselves caught in a feedback loop in which irrational negative beliefs caused powerful negative feelings, which in turn seemed to drive patients’ reasoning, motivating them to find evidence to support their negative beliefs. Beck noticed a common pattern of beliefs, which he called the “cognitive triad” of depression: “I’m no good,” “My world is bleak,” and “My future is hopeless.”
 
Many people experience one or two of these thoughts fleetingly, but depressed people tend to hold all three beliefs in a stable and enduring psychological structure. Psychologists call such structures schemas. Schemas refer to the patterns of thoughts and behaviors, built up over time, that people use to process information quickly and effortlessly as they interact with the world. Schemas are deep down in the elephant; they are one of the ways in which the elephant guides the rider. Depressed people have schemas about themselves and their paths through life that are thoroughly disempowering.
 
Beck’s great discovery was that it is possible to break the disempowering feedback cycle between negative beliefs and negative emotions. If you can get people to examine these beliefs and consider counterevidence, it gives them at least some moments of relief from negative emotions, and if you release them from negative emotions, they become more open to questioning their negative beliefs. It takes some skill to do this—depressed people are very good at finding evidence for the beliefs in the triad. And it takes time.
 
But it is possible to train people to learn Beck’s method so they can question their automatic thoughts on their own, every day. With repetition, over a period of weeks or months, people can change their schemas and create different, more helpful habitual beliefs (such as “I can handle most challenges” or “I have friends I can trust”). With CBT, there is no need to spend years talking about one’s childhood.
 
The list below shows nine of the most common cognitive distortions that people learn to recognize in CBT [based on a longer list in Robert Leahy, Stephen Holland, and Lata McGinn’s book, Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders]
 

EMOTIONAL REASONING: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”
 
CATASTROPHIZING: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. “It would be terrible if I failed.”
 
OVERGENERALIZING: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”
 
DICHOTOMOUS THINKING (also known variously as “black-and-white thinking,” “all-or-nothing thinking,” and “binary thinking”): Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”
 
MIND READING: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”
 
LABELING: Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (often in the service of dichotomous thinking). “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.”
 
NEGATIVE FILTERING: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”
 
DISCOUNTING POSITIVES: Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgment. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”
 
BLAMING: Focusing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings; you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.

- Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: 

How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation, 2018

The Definition of 'Trauma'

In the early versions of the primary manual of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatrists used the word “trauma” only to describe a physical agent causing physical damage, as in the case of what we now call traumatic brain injury.
 
In the 1980 revision, however, the manual (DSM III) recognized “post-traumatic stress disorder” as a mental disorder—the first type of traumatic injury that isn’t physical. PTSD is caused by an extraordinary and terrifying experience, and the criteria for a traumatic event that warrants a diagnosis of PTSD were (and are) strict: to qualify, an event would have to “evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone” and be “outside the range of usual human experience.” The DSM III emphasized that the event was not based on a subjective standard. It had to be something that would cause most people to have a severe reaction. War, rape, and torture were included in this category. Divorce and simple bereavement (as in the death of a spouse due to natural causes), on the other hand, were not, because they are normal parts of life, even if unexpected. These experiences are sad and painful, but pain is not the same thing as trauma. People in these situations that don’t fall into the “trauma” category might benefit from counseling, but they generally recover from such losses without any therapeutic interventions. In fact, even most people who do have traumatic experiences recover completely without intervention.
 
By the early 2000s, however, the concept of “trauma” within parts of the therapeutic community had crept down so far that it included anything “experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful . . . with lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.” The subjective experience of “harm” became definitional in assessing trauma. As a result, the word “trauma” became much more widely used, not just by mental health professionals but by their clients and patients—including an increasing number of college students.
 
As with trauma, a key change for most of the concepts was the shift to a subjective standard. It was not for anyone else to decide what counted as trauma, bullying, or abuse; if it felt like that to you, trust your feelings. If a person reported that an event was traumatic (or bullying or abusive), his or her subjective assessment was increasingly taken as sufficient evidence. And if a rapidly growing number of students have been diagnosed with a mental disorder, then there is a rapidly growing need for the campus community to protect them. 

Concepts sometimes creep. Concepts like trauma and safety have expanded so far since the 1980s that they are often employed in ways that are no longer grounded in legitimate psychological research. Grossly expanded conceptions of trauma and safety are now used to justify the overprotection of children of all ages—even college students, who are sometimes said to need safe spaces and trigger warnings lest words and ideas put them in danger.

- Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: 

How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation, 2018

The Needs for Connection - Belonging & Intimacy

 The need for connection—to form and maintain at least a minimal number of positive, stable, intimate relationships—is a fundamental need that affects our whole being, permeating our entire suite of emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. While individuals differ in the strength of this need, connection is an irreducible, undeniable human need. The need for connection actually consists of two subneeds: (a) The need to belong, to be liked, to be accepted, and (b) The need for intimacy, for mutuality, for relatedness.
 
The Need for Belonging
 
As with all the other needs, the critical metric is the distance between your need for belonging and just how unmet this need is in your daily life. Research shows that those who report the highest levels of loneliness are those who have the highest unmet need to belong. The greater the discrepancy between a person’s need to belong and their satisfaction with their personal relationships, the higher the levels of loneliness and the lower the levels of life satisfaction in their daily lives.
 
This finding applies both to those who are living alone as well as those who are living with others. Simply living with someone does not guarantee that connection needs are being met. It’s the quality of the connections that matter for predicting loneliness, not the quantity of connections or even the proximity of the connections. Let’s take a closer look at this other essential component of connection.
 
The Need for Intimacy
 
While a secure attachment style serves as a critical foundation for connection, it does not assure intimacy. The essence of intimacy is a high-quality connection. What is a high-quality connection? Jane Dutton and Emily Heaphy define a high-quality connection as a “dynamic, living tissue that exists between two people when there is some contact between them involving mutual awareness and social interaction.”A high-quality connection makes both people feel especially vital and alive. A low-quality connection, on the other hand, can be downright depleting. As one business manager put it, “Corrosive connections are like black holes: they absorb all of the light in the system and give back nothing in return.”
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

The Need for Attachment Security

The four adult categories of attachment style—secure, fearful, preoccupied, and dismissing—can be represented as a combination of just two dimensions: anxious and avoidant. The anxious-attachment dimension reflects a concern about being rejected and abandoned and is the product of beliefs about whether others will be there for you in times of need. The avoidant-attachment dimension has less to do with a sense of safety and more to do with how you regulate your emotions in response to stress—whether you use others as a secure base or pull away and withdraw from them.
 
Studies show that these two dimensions are only weakly correlated with each other, which creates the possibility that people can score high on both dimensions. A further implication is that “secure attachment” doesn’t exist as a separate category; secure attachment is just the combination of low anxiety and low avoidance. Modern research suggests that there is no such thing as a completely securely attached person; all of us are at least a little bit anxious and avoidant when stress rears its head in our relationships.
 
Nevertheless, your particular placement on the anxious- and avoidant-attachment dimensions has important implications. Those who score lower on these dimensions tend to report more constructive ways of coping and regulating their emotions, thoughts, and behavior, and they report higher levels of relationship satisfaction, psychological adjustment, healthy self-esteem, and even heightened altruism, volunteerism, empathy, and increased tolerance of people who are in a different social group than those who are more insecurely attached. It’s clear that secure attachment doesn’t just set the stage for more satisfying relationships; it also sets the stage for many other aspects of growth.

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020