Whenever I read a book, I start feeling sleepy after a while no matter how interested I am in the topic. I have also heard others to have similar experience. Why does this happen?
In: Biology
I think there are a few possible reasons for this. In reverse to your situation, my psych actually recommended that I physically pick up and read a book (not my phone or kindle) to induce sleep. It’s the repetitive eye movement back and forth that eventually causes fatigue and the need to rest.
(For clarification, she recommended to physically pick up a book or magazine because it would cause a greater span of left to right eye movement than reading from a small screen)
You’re lying still in one place, not moving anything except your eyes and an occasional hand. Your heartbeat slows to resting. It’s quiet, nothing loud or disruptive going on around you, maybe for the first time all day. The only thing your brain is doing is following the story, not worrying about work or money or family or commercials or traffic or anything except what’s going on on the page.
If you’re already tired, which a lot of us are constantly, an hour or two of that could be enough to put you to sleep.
It’s because you’re actually tired, reading a book is very relaxing, hence you fall asleep.
I have a baseless hypothesis that, because so many of us had our parents or someone read is to sleep as kids, we kind of get sleepy from reading. I wasn’t really read to, because I have four younger brothers and two crazy parents, but I love reading. It tends to keep me up. But my son’s mom was read to every night, and she could never read more than one or two pages before being asleep.
It’s funny–I’ve thought this for 15 years now, and I’ve even said it out loud, but writing it out just now makes it seem like a stretch. Reading and being read to are very different, brain-wise. Or are they? We *do* tend to subvocalize, and language is language…
Oh boy.
As we are getting new informations/data while reading a book , our brain starts processing the acquired information into memory hence making new connections in our brain relevant to it. This process overtime makes your brain tired which makes your body feel sleepy . Actually this sleepy feeling might signal us that our brain has been overwhelmed by the information received from the book and it’s time for the brain to take some rest.
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