This paper addresses the crucial task of automatic sleep stage classification to assist sleep experts in diagnosing sleep disorders such as sleep apnea and insomnia. The proposed solution presents a novel attention-based deep learning model called, Efficient Attention-sleep Model (EASM), designed specifically for sleep apnea detection using EEG signals. EASM incorporates a streamlined architecture that includes a modified Muti-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network (MRCNN), Adaptive Feature Recalibration (AFR), and a simplified Temporal Context Encoder (TCE) module to reduce complexity. To mitigate overfitting, ridge regression is utilized, which incorporates a penalty term to enhance model generalization. Furthermore, the proposed EASM utilizes a class-balanced focal loss function to address data imbalance issues. The effectiveness of EASM is evaluated on two publicly available datasets, SLEEP EDF-20 and SLEEP EDF-78. Comparative analysis of EASM against state-of-the-art models demonstrates its superior performance in terms of accuracy, training time, and model complexity. Notably, the proposed model achieves a 50% reduction in training time and a 55.7% decrease in complexity compared to the Attnsleep model. The EASM achieves a classification accuracy of 85.8% with minimum loss when compared to the Attnsleep model. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024.