Oura breaks your night into deep, REM and light sleep, and it’s tempting to treat the percentages as a report card. They’re more useful as a description of what your body did — each stage has a job, and “good” looks different for different people.
Deep sleep is the body’s physical-repair shift — tissue recovery, immune work, the heaviest, hardest-to-wake stage, concentrated early in the night. REM is when the brain does its work: consolidating memory, processing emotion, and most of your vivid dreaming, weighted toward the second half of the night. Light sleep is the connective tissue, the largest share, ferrying you between the other two.
As a rough guide, adults tend to spend the majority of the night in light sleep, with deep and REM each taking a smaller slice. But the “right” mix shifts with age — deep sleep declines as you get older — and varies person to person. Use the typical ranges as orientation, not a target to hit.
A sleep lab stages sleep from brain waves (EEG). A ring infers stages from heart rate, movement and temperature, which is impressively good but not identical. Treat the boundaries as approximate: the broad shape of your night and how it trends are reliable; the exact minute count of REM on any single night is an estimate.
The useful move isn’t comparing your deep-sleep percentage to a friend’s — it’s watching your own pattern. Is your deep sleep clustering early as it should? Is REM getting cut short on nights you sleep too little or drink? Those personal patterns, tracked over weeks, tell you far more than any single night’s breakdown.
Vitra reads your sleep stages against your own baseline and explains the night in plain English — flagging when deep or REM is unusually low for you, and tying it to the likely cause, instead of leaving you to interpret four bars on a chart.
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