I’ve just noticed, that when I take a nap, my body wakes myself up within 1 – 2 hours. This is probably true for everyone else too. But our bodies allow us to sleep for 8 hours at night. Why can’t our bodies nap for a full 8 hours without waking up? How does our body know this? How does our body differentiate between napping vs a nights sleep?
In: Biology
Your body has a rough sense of time that it uses to determine when to rest. For the most part it’s diurnal meaning we are awake during the day and sleep at night (the opposite of nocturnal like raccoons or bats).
This “internal clock” plays a part in telling us to go to sleep in the evening, but it’s not the only process that does so. Your brain also accumulates a sort of “brain waste” throughout your time awake, and mental exhaustion and sleepiness is your brain’s way of telling you it needs to flush that out. To us it seems like we are running out of energy like we’ve used up something, but really it’s that we need to flush something out. That’s why you can sleep extra to “catch up on sleep” but you can’t sleep extra ahead of time to “bank sleep” – you can’t empty any more waste past zero.
When you nap, you are letting your brain flush out some of its tiredness, but it doesn’t have as much to get rid of as after a full day, so that process doesn’t take as long. Then, when you’re only a little asleep and not in deep sleep because you don’t need it, that body clock says “oh wait, it’s daytime, shouldn’t you be awake?” And wakes you up.
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