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Delta waves
yagr
Veteran
I'm uncertain where to put thread; my apologies if it's in the wrong sub-forum. My interest lies in finding a Buddhist understanding but it is a medical situation. I've recently gotten my results back from a sleep study that I underwent.
My question is, what are the costs (physically, psychologically or spiritually) of zero percentage of stage 3 sleep which is the level of sleep where delta waves are present. It is my understanding that deep meditative states create delta waves in the brain. The only other place that they are created naturally is during this stage three sleep. The sleep study determined that I spend time in stage one and stage two but did not enter stage three or REM sleep at all. Any input would be appreciated.
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I think the salient question is - How are you sleeping @yagr?
btw - got my wife's ass in gear, she's home tonight with laptop - review OIW by the morrow...
sorry for the delay
I think it depends on a lot of things. For an average person, no REM sleep can lead to a lot of health problems, both physically and psychologically. But there are also people who have neurological conditions where the lack of REM sleep seems to be a side effect and they aren't as drastically affected (or maybe it is just less obvious because they are dealing with other things, as well). Also, one always has to keep in mind that how one person reacts might be quite different compared to how someone else does. One of the major problems with sleep disorders is how much they impact the overall hormones in the body, which are often dependent on each other to regulate circadian rhythms and all sorts of other body systems.
nods
Well, the answer to how I'm sleeping is difficult to answer. I've had everyone who has ever shared a household with me suggest that I have a sleep study done for the last 25 years or so. So, I suppose I'm sleeping normally - at least for me, whatever that means. I went twenty-four years sleeping only on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays; my schedule didn't allow for sleep on Fridays or Sundays. Yes, I know - but we all have to make hard decisions sometimes and I was willing to pay the price.
As for how it's affecting me...impossible to tell. The last couple of years I've had my health tank and it has been a constant question on my mind: is this lower threshold for patience and tolerance a result of dealing with chronic pain that wasn't there before or something else? It might be sleep, but as I said, I've never been very good at sleep.
(ty anataman for the update)
Sleep deprivation can really upset the natural rhythms; I know from my job and my headaches - anything that causes less than 3-4 hours per night can really be draining and damaging to physical and mental health as @karasti mentions above. I think I have spent about 15 years of my life as a zombie... Perhaps you might like to share it on a more personal level.
FWIW, I went through a quite intense time, what some call, 'a state of grace'. I slept very little, probably three to four hours and had no dreams that I recall. This went on for many months. My waking consciousness was meditative and I should imagine but can not confirm was partly producing delta waves. It seemed perfectly OK with high energy levels.
If I meditate a lot, the sleep requirement goes right down. On retreats four hours seems far too much.
Binaural feedback or mind machines are supposed to enable the production of different wave functions. I never found them of much use compared to ambient music or relaxing sounds.
Do be aware, I am sure you are, that sleep is healing, a good thing and people's patterns and needs vary.
I found that a bit when I first started my 30 day challenge. But now I am sleeping regularly but on less hours than I have needed before.
to preface my comment: i don't know all that much bout medicine, so i'll try and limit this to my personal experience
there are various sleep schedules that are meant to give one more hours "awake" in a day, and they are kind-of interesting. there is one called the dymaxion, and one called the uberman sleep schedule. others exist, those probably the two best-known.
i tried the uberman sleep schedule for about ..one or two weeks. the idea is that every 4 hours you take a 30 minute nap. so in a day of 24 hours you take 6 naps, although you might start to imagine that a new cycle is starting every 4 hours, which is basically the case.
at first it took my body about 5 days to get used to it. i had a 26-minute special mp3 that was simply the sound of white noise for about 22 minutes (getting progressively louder) and then at the end a variety of sounds (from waves splashing all the way to roosters crowing) to wake one up by about minute 26. that helped me condition my body into sleeping for that long.
the dreams i had during times when i could successfully "dive" straight into deep sleep were intensely colourful and vivid.
then i ended up going to a party on a saturday and staying up wayyy past the 4 hour mark. it's interesting because once your body adjusts you simply cannot go past 4 hours without taking a nap, you feel immensely sleepy and your body starts doing the restorative functions it normally only lapses into when you're safely tucked away in your comforter.
so like that, you can easily reset your clock to the standard biologically and "sleep once a day" vibe.
of course, many scientists [admittedly needs citation beyond my personal research] would suggest that biphasic sleep (taking a siesta / nap in the afternoon) is a more healthy way of functioning in the world.
@lobster mentioned that the need for sleep goes down with the amount of meditation done. i would agree from personal experience to a large extent. the quality of sleep for when you do actually get horizontal is usually improved as well.
there have been many studies done and the overwhelmingly conclusive evidence points to the fact that every human dreams when they sleep, and multiple times at that. we are simply unaware of it most of the time. there is dream recall, which you can train for simply by setting your intention as you lay to rest to recall your dream, and you can burn the candle from both ends by keeping a journal handy and writing down all you can recall before you open your eyes and move your body too much. returning to a pose you were recently in can help a dream "un-dissolve" and you can end up recalling more of it.
so you're wondering if you need delta waves.. well, delta waves are not really a thing unto themselves, and not from a snooty metaphysical point of view that has no compassionate backing, but from a simply mathematical view... or a analog view (analog vs digital kinda-sense).
basically your brain waves come in lots of different shapes, because a brain "wave" is just a nice shifting staircase of electrical sig-impulses (inventing words) .. you put a bunch of electrodes on someone's head that can read tiny levels of electrical potential change (EEG electro-encephalogram) and get a real-time view.. like how seismologists measure earthquakes, you get a readout like that.
slow wave sleep (SWS, presumably where we observe "delta waves") .. "is called slow wave sleep because the EEG activity is synchronized, producing slow waves with a frequency of less than 1 Hz and a relatively high amplitude" [wiki]
(as i just recently learnt here http://wps.prenhall.com/hss_mcgrath_buildingst_4/20/5232/1339479.cw/index.html
and here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-wave_sleep )
and i suppose most organisms experience this shape manifesting while they are in deep sleep. and human beings share over 99.9% the same dna .. which is mostly just a nice aside but perhaps relevant to discussion [ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1416706/DNA-survey-finds-all-humans-are-99.9pc-the-same.html ]
(woo a citation for something!)
meditation, as per one of the nice diagrams i saw on here recently, allows ones mind to calm to similar levels of around and below 1 hz, which is a very plebeian way of saying that there are very deep mind states one can access through the practice and application of meditation, and in the way the Buddha taught, can be harnessed and utilized to gain insight into nature, its functioning, coming together, and ultimately its unraveling.
so sorta in response to your question, no you don't "need" delta waves to be apparent in your sleep, only you can decide if your sleep is restful or not. and there's a lot, perhaps you get peak and perfect "sleep" but stay in bed longer and throw the cycling off a bit. if you have had an EEG done while you were nearing dream-state, you can see your brain light up "like a christmas tree" because in REM sleep one's brain patterns as as active as one who is wide awake.
there are certain things that happen during phasing into stage III sleep, which include body paralysis. it is possible to be aware during this experience, having developed a very watchfull mind, developing lots of understanding and faith in the dharma, and multiple meditation sits every day were what my life was like when i had an experience like this.
i don't think one could be alive without tapping into low-wave brain functioning every once in a while. if you stay awake for longer than a day or two your body will start twitching into "microsleep" and you'll manifest delta wave activity briefly, sort of like your body smacking you with the go-to-sleep stick.
@lobster said
Hi lobster. This made me wonder what the relationship between mania and spiritual states. I have read that many successful people are hypomanic or just a taste. I have had experiences of grace where jogging and someone smiling and saying 'good morning' was so stirring and poignant. I am very curious what I would have discovered spiritually if I sort of 'surfed' my mentality rather than medicated it. That is I am curious about people who do not experience disfunction can go about their experience of life in a spiritual way. If it is a hypo manic (below mania).
There is a relationship. I have been manic, crazy, intoxicated and nearly sane. If you have medication, take it. Hearing voices leads to being talked to by [insert voice]
This question intrigued me. I had a friend who was very crazy, he was a long term mental hospital patient, lost a kidney when trying to hang himself from a tree. Mad as a fruit cake. Thought the human race was evolving to become monkey like creatures to live in trees again. He also has Buddha Nature. Required injections to stop him being a nuisance, living in caves and trying to live on bird food.
A broken body or mind may provide insight but taking medicine, wearing prosthetics is skilful. Trust your lama, trust your doctor. Doubt your voices.
OM YA HA HUM
Body directional alignment may change how you sleep. Made a noticeable to me that seems more than suggestion . . .
http://bodyecology.com/articles/could-direction-you-sleep-improve-health.php
@lobster that's really cool you mention that. in this book called "conscious dreaming" this dude.. well he basically wrote it because people just asked him stuff so frequently, and it's an excellent resource. he talks about his experience with dreaming and visiting native americans to help him interpret some very native-american imagery from his dreams, and has always felt a deep connection to the land and that culture...
in the book he talks about tips and good habits one can adopt for dream recall and lucid dreaming, or "conscious dreaming" and one of the things i found very interesting in that book is that if you rouse your body from sleep and lose you dream... return to the posture you were in while "dreaming" and more of the atmosphere/event'ing will come back to you.
and it works! which is wild.
Doesn't work for me.... Maybe it will now you have suggested it....