why do people feel extremely tired during the day, and wide awake at night?
In: Biology
Check out [B-Society](https://www.b-society.org/chronobiology/), an advocacy group for those of us who are late risers and function better in the evening. It explains a lot of the biology and also the harmful impacts of a society designed to cater only to early risers.
It is a fairly common problem, but that doesn’t mean it’s normal. If this is you, please get checked out by your doctor.
There’s a few possibilities of what’s gone off. It could be a dysfunctional circadian rhythm – which is your internal clock and handles things like eating and sleeping regularly – and can have it’s own issues or be knocked askew by things like night time use of blue lights, irregular wake up times, or jetlag. It could also be a sleep problem itself; including sleep apnea, which is when you stop breathing in your sleep and therefore you wake up for long enough to start breathing again but not to remember it; restless leg syndrome, where usually the legs but sometimes the arms need to be moved continually through the day, including interrupting sleep; parasomnias, like sleep walking or talking, hallucinations or sleep paralysis; etc. And then there’s external factors: like having someone wake you up repeatedly, say a baby or a snoring roommate; the room you’re sleeping in being too hot or too cold; consuming too much caffeine or other stimulants or consuming them too close to your bedtime; etc.
As you can see, there’s a few very common possible causes, like waking up at different times on weekends and weekdays, drinking too much coffee because you’re already feeling tired, or using blue lights like your electronics too close to bedtime or even in bed. The set of recommendations that doctor’s give out to people with sleep problems at first is called sleep hygiene, and it basically eliminates all the common and simple issues that could be messing with your sleep. There’s also sleep studies, where you go to a lab to spend the night hooked up to all sorts of monitors to check if there’s an issue with your sleep itself. Excessive daytime sleepiness is super common, but it can be a red flag of something going pretty badly, such as sleep apnea, and therefore should be assessed by a doctor.
Naturally humans are designed to be diurnal ( non- nocturnal )
But there are many reasons as to why many people feel active at night. One of the many reasons could be those sleeping disorders. If not those, then it could be just the fact that at night the environment very peaceful. There is no disturbance around you and it is the only time when you can be THE REAL YOU. So that peace might usually help you to stay awake and do your work and the calmness and peace around you also makes you think a lot about a lot of things like work, studies, life , future plans etc. Also humans are designed to be adaptive to any kind of environment. Most of us stay awake at night just scrolling through social media profiles even though there is nothing interesting going on. We just want to pass the time because we don’t wanna sleep and mobiles have become really persuasive. Many of us don’t sleep at night because we want to spend our whole night stalking, scrolling or chatting with friends. And the next day, you will feel extremely tired because you were awake the whole night and your body too needs rest !
There are many reasons as to why people don’t sleep at night. It is better to work on it because not sleeping at night and sleeping at day disrupts your entire body pattern and it is very unhealthy.
P.S – Even I don’t sleep at night because of the many reasons that I have mentioned above. It is not necessary that you also have the same reasons. My answer is purely based on my experience and a bit of knowledge
Because we have messed up our circadian rhythms with blue lights, which were not around when our evolution determined how we would sleep. Now we all have sleep ranging from mediocre to totally ruined. Then we are tired during the day. May other health and mental health consequences follow.
Basically you have a clock inside you. It’s called your Circadian Rhythm, and it determines things like when you sleep best, when you’re in the best mood, etc.
Most people have a CR that’s about 24 hours long. And if your CR says you’re happiest and most energetic around 7 AM, and tired and grumpy at night, you’re a morning person. Same goes for the other way around
Socially, night-owls are seen as lazy or weird on purpose sometimes. However, I recdntly read about different circadian rhytmns in a scientific article not too long ago, which stated it’s historically sense for night owls existing amidst our society. Will try to recite some of my main takeaways from there.
Most of the population follow the normal day and night cycle, starting at a relatively ‘early’ morning and going to bed late evening. However, there has recently been research and insight into official smaller groups of circadian rhythms. You have the super early risers, that will start their day at like 4/5am, and then you have your waking up almost afternoon group, which is very much me.
The biggest takeaway I had is that it makes sense to have a small group of people that are late risers and late sleepers. Historically, humans faced natural dangers at night and needed to have cycles of the population to keep watch of the rest and the young. They mentioned that researchers looked at untouched Amazon tribes in present day, and found that on average, all of the tribe were asleep at the same time for only 18 minutes. Late risers and sleepers, aka the Night Owls of the group, were mainly tasked with being the night security for 80% of your normal day time hunters/gatherers.
I’ll take a look and see if I can find where I read this all if anyone’s really interested in reading up on it more.
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