What causes grogginess when you first wake up – what about your brain isn’t working?
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It means that you woke up at the *wrong time* meaning you brain was going through a phase where you are deeper asleep.
Sleep is an active process with stages and regular phases. These phases are not equal in time or quality, but they are all very important. You go through about 3 of these, and how long they last is highly individual. So go through them quicker and can do with just 5 hours of asleep, some need quite lot and need 9 hours of sleep. When the sleeping starts, the first cycle of phases is shortest, and the last before you naturally wake up is the longest and all the phases in it are longest.
So if you wake up during the lighter stages, you just snap awake as if nothing has happened. The deeper you are when you wake up, the harder it is to wake up and the worse you feel. If you wake up from the deepest and longest phase (Like the last deep stage in the morning), you can feel physically sick, be really confused and feel like your brain isn’t working. You might do things and not remember doing them and generally just work in *automatic mode*. This is the “Put the milk in the cupboard and cereal in to the fridge” that is joked a bout.
Why is this then? Well we don’t actually know or understand since we really don’t understand the mechanisms of sleep, we have so ideas about it such as: It is an active process; There are stages and phases; It is tied to the overall circadian rhythm, so it isn’t just the opposite of “being awake” but being awake and asleep go hand in hand; During different phases different things happen in your body and brain, some of these things happen at set intervals even if you don’t sleep, things like changes in body temperature, blood levels, hormones, changes in behaviour; in brain there are very complicated active phases. If you skip a night without asleep and you get to your regular “you are awake phase” unless you are really sleep deprived, you will probably feel about normal especially if there is lots of sun light. (Effect familiar to many who live up north enough to experience midnight sun, or have visited such area. Your body gets all sorts of confused until you get used to it.)
But when you wake up during a deep sleep stage, it is like stalling your car’s engine to high gear. You need play with the clutch to free the engine, re-orient your gears, start your engine and give it some energy so it gets going, then resume driving. (I realise this analogy only makes sense to those who can drive stick or manual work vehicles). Alternatively you could imagine that you brain is a computer which was doing resource intensive work, which suddenly got interrupted; After which the computer needs to take a moment to free up the the threads of the CPU, clear up memory, remove temporary files from the drive. And then it start to work as it is supposed to again.
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