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Better Sleep = Better Performance

Not only does getting a good night's sleep each night allow your body and mind to recuperate from the stress and hard work of day-to-day activities, but it actually builds your long-term memory to store the knowledge acquired during the day.

Experiments performed by Robert Stickgold, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, show that our memory of newly learned information improves only after sleeping at least six hours.

Following are the different stages of sleep that contribute to the brain's learning and storage process.

• Stage One: The first two hours of sleep are spent in deep sleep where information that has been gathered during the day flows into the cortex. This is where long-term memories are stored.
• Stage Two: During the next hours the cortex sorts through the information, "filing" it to various locations and networks.
• Stage Three: The final two hours, the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) stage of sleep, is the crucial sleep phase for restoring the mind. Elaborate dreams and high levels of brain activity characterize this cycle of sleep. During this stage, the mind sorts out the day's experiences and reorganizes them. This explains why we often seem to solve problems in our dreams! Many artists, musicians, and scientists report that they do their most creative thinking while they are sleeping.

Sleep Number® Bed Studies

A clinical study conducted at the Stanford University Medical Center, Sleep Disorders Center in Palo Alto, California, compared The Sleep Number Bed by Select Comfort™ against premium innerspring mattresses. The study found that 87% of the Sleep Number® bed test subjects spent a higher percentage of sleeping time in the deeper REM stages of sleep.

Learn more about the Sleep Number bed.