What causes grogginess when you first wake up – what about your brain isn’t working?
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When you go to sleep your brain is filled with sleepy juice so that you don’t wake up every time a dog farts next door.
This sleepy juice takes a while to go away once you wake up.
Haha nice, and pretty much spot on, nearly everyone has tried to stay “asleep enough” to go to toilet and then back to bed right? We have that ability all the time, presumably because other humans can guard us, some other mammals are the reverse.
Most areas of the brain will change its output base on “sleep juice ” we really have several types and locations for cognition, sleep makes them all dopey.
Personally, I think sleep makes all these areas come back into timing.
Read “why do we sleep”, etc. Still pretty controversial.
Your sleep is made of two different flavors: the “rest your brain” one and the “reorganize your brain” one. You get woken up in the first one, not good. You get woken up in the second one, good. Each night you cycle over multiple “rest your brain” and “reorganize your brain” phases.
As a narcoleptic I explain it to people like this. When you sleep, your brain turns into a Zelda game. Your levels of sleep are the dungeons. If you go into the first room in a dungeon, and you lose a heart, it’s easy to go right back out and get more health. The further into the dungeon you go, the longer it takes to get back out. Sleep is like that too. If you are in those light beta waves of sleep, it’s easy to wake up again(partners snores wake you up, you hear dog fart and roll over). If you’re in deep stages of sleep, a blaring alarm waking you up will for sure wake you up, but it will take longer for your brain to catch up to that state of wakefulness.
When we go to sleep, our brain goes through cycles. think of it like a big circle, with “check points” where you stop and switch activities. Sometimes we wake up in the middle of that “cycle”, and it’s much harder to skip ahead to “awake” because we are stuck way back in the middle of those checkpoints. During those “stops” we have different states of unconsciousness, and sometimes when we are dreaming (such as REM sleep) it’s much more difficult to “snap” back to being conscious. Our brain has to clean up the chemicals that were helping us stay in that deep sleep state (that helps refresh our brains for the next day), so that groggy period is just our brain catching up because we interrupted the usual cycle.
I dont understand it well enough to explain like ur five, but it might be related to something called “cortisol,” which is a chemical humans produce to regulate ourselves. It takes a little bit of time after waking up for us to be producing cortisol in a high enough amount to feel awake.
i was eating 10mg melatonin before bed because i thought it would help w my insomnia. made me tired and groggy all day. same thing w wake and bakes after the high wears off
Eating a lot of carbs/sugar before going to bed will absolutely cause grogginess in the morning. I’ve called it a carb hangover.
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.
Also, what was the common term for “groggy” before British sailors started drinking watered-down rum (grog)?
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