Waking up several times throughout the night is a natural occurrence often due to sleep architecture. Sleep architecture refers to the stages of sleep people cycle through during the night in about 90 to 120-minute intervals (间隔). The cycle begins with a light sleep that transitions into a deeper sleep, and then into the deepest sleep that occurs in the third stage, often referred to as “slow-wave sleep,” Dr. Brandon Peters-Mathews said. During the fourth stage, known as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, brain activity picks up to levels that almost reach normal activity while awake — it’s after this stage when people often wake up naturally, he said, and once they fall back asleep the cycle begins again.
“Because we tend to go to bed at roughly the same time on a nightly basis, and these cycles are roughly the same length, we may wake at the same time in the night,” Peters-Mathews said. Most of these awakenings will be brief and forgettable, but “there might be one or two cycles into the night that we wake up and look at the clock and are aware of the time.”
Waking up several times throughout the night is typically not disruptive to one’s health, as long as falling back asleep occurs within about five to 10 minutes, said Dr. Michelle Drerup. But on the other hand, when people find themselves waking up multiple times within the hour, that could cause a sleep cycle to be fragmented and the individual might not get any deep sleep, Drerup said. These frequent awakenings could be a sign of sleep disorders such as sleep apnea or nocturia, she added.
It’s often a person’s emotional response to the awakening that can pose challenges, Peters-Mathews said, and could result in someone developing secondary insomnia (失眠) if their reaction causes long periods of wakefulness. “If somebody wakes in the night, and the first thing they do is look to their alarm clock, and see what time it is, and that’s something that makes them feel frustrated or upset or anxious as they anticipate the next day — it’s the reaction that’ problematic,” he said.
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