This is something that happens to me from time to time since I was a kid.
I would take a nap after lunch, on a day like today. Then sometimes wake up feeling disoriented and depressed. Other times I’d feel fine.
What causes this specifically and why does it only happen sometimes?
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Our sleep pattern cycles every 90 minutes. The first 30 mins is light, the next 30 is deep, and the 30 after that is rousing you back into light sleep. If you never want to have a groggy nap again, sleep either 30 mins or an hour and a half. You’ll be in, or close enough, to light sleep, that it won’t make you feel like you got hit by a truck.
Any more than an hour and a half, your body starts prepping for the big 8 hour sleep where you’re immobilised and going into REM. There’s a bunch of other processes your brain goes through when you go down for the night-time sleep like memory categorisation/body restoration/etc. Your circadian rhythm (24 hour physical/mental/behavioural cycle) can’t usually tell the difference between a 2pm nap and a 10pm bed time. So interrupting that rhythm and those processes ends up feeling quite bad.
(this is VERY generalised information that I’ve gathered over a few years of brushing up against sleep studies and sleep behaviour analyses for pure curiosities’ sake. take it with a grain of salt.)
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