If you want to say goodbye to sleep deprivation forever, overcoming poor sleep quality is essential.

Your sleep quality will determine:

1. Your ability to stay asleep throughout the night
2. How refreshed you feel during the day

Sleep quality is a measure of how good your sleep is. The deeper your sleep, the better your sleep quality. The lighter your sleep, the worse your sleep quality.

In this article we’ll cover the common symptoms of poor sleep quality, what causes it, and how to know for sure whether it’s impacting your sleep and daytime alertness.

Symptoms of Poor Sleep Quality

The two classic signs of poor sleep quality are:

1. Feeling sleepy during the day

When you have poor sleep quality, it doesn’t matter how long you sleep for, you’ll find it hard to get out of bed in the morning and you’ll feel sleepy throughout the day. Even if you got the recommended 8 to 9 hours of sleep. Sleep just isn’t refreshing.

2. Keep waking up in the night

It’s totally normal to wake up once or twice in the night. But if you find yourself constantly waking up, then that’s a sign of poor sleep quality. Especially if you find it difficult to fall back to sleep again.

Causes of Poor Sleep Quality

The cause of poor sleep quality is simple. You’re:

1. Spending too much time in light sleep
2. Not spending enough time in deep sleep

You see, sleep varies in depth throughout the night. When you first fall asleep:

• You start in light sleep
• You slowly transition into deep sleep
• You go back into light sleep again

Sleep cycles through these stages several times a night. The stages of sleep article talks about this in much more detail.

So to get to deep sleep, your body must progress from light sleep to deep sleep. But if you wake up before you reach deep sleep, you’ve got to start back at light sleep again.

The more times you wake up, the less time your body will spend in deep sleep. And as a result, you’ll have poor sleep quality.

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When it comes to beating sleep deprivation, it’s not enough to just spend more time sleeping. You also need to make sure you’re getting in plenty of deep sleep. Otherwise, no matter how long you sleep, you’ll still feel sleepy.

To get your sleep quality back on track, read the top 10 ways to improve your sleep quality.