Why is it hard for us to get out of bed, but once we’re awake its hard to go back to sleep?
In: Biology
I’m a middle school student, so it may not be great, but my recommendation is to get a better pillow (screw those fancy matresses), get a morning and evening routine (mine is to brush my teeth, 10 minutes of stretching/working out limbs, walk around my house 2x, like with a shoulder against the walls, to drink a glass of water, then to lay down in my bed with lights out until I fall asleep), also alternate between sleeping on your sides & back.
Newton’s first law of motion – just kidding of course. It’s actually for different reasons as far as we know.
Not wanting to go to bed is called sleep procrastination, and not a lot of research has been done so far, but most of them do point towards self-discipline/self-control as a main reason (which is why not everyone has this problem) . It’s not so much a question of ‘not wanting to go to sleep’ as it is a question of ‘not wanting to stop what I’m doing’. Maybe you want to keep scrolling your phone, or feel like you didn’t get enough time to do your hobby after work, etc. We just like to keep doing what makes us happy, and the happiness we have from keeping on doing what we’re doing is much more tangible and attractive than the distant chore of having to go to bed. NOTE: there might be other reasons as well of course, for example: teenagers’ circadean rhythm (when our body thinks a day starts and ends) shifts slightly later, meaning they’re simple not as tired as we’d expect them to be at that hour, or when you are suffering from depression or mania, or compulsive worrying, everything gets really mangled up!
As to waking up, well, perhaps you haven’t slept enough or regularly enough in the past few days, or you had a bad night sleep and are still tired, or you have stayed in bed so often your body is simply not used to becoming active as soon as you’re awake! But what if you’re actually a perfectly disciplined sleeper and still can’t get up? Well, assuming you aren’t being tormented by stress, anxiety or depression, you might have a bit of a nutritional deficiency, such as vitamin D,… (in which case – as with all other medical and neurological reasons: go to a doctor!), may lack an overview of what your day will bring and don’t see the point, or it might just be that we like the warmth and comfort of our beds. That’s obviously far more preferable then the cold, violent postapocalyptic world we live in now, and that’s something we all can understand.
**TLDR;** we don’t procrastinate sleep, we actually don’t want to stop the activities we’re engaged in, and having trouble waking up might be due to several medical issues, such as lacking a **regular** sleep pattern, vitamin D deficiency, anxiety,… But might also just be because you like to hold your SO/Teddy bear/both beneath a warm duvet.
Edit:My advice: sleep regularly, get out of bed as soon as you wake up, exercise (a little bit) , eat (reasonably) healthy, take care of your mental health and perhaps ask your doctor for some vitamine D in winter.
Edit2: spelling.
Edit3: as requested: being ‘too tired to sleep’ is actually another way of saying you have (acute) sleep deprivation. Some time before you go to sleep, your body stops producing the hormones you need during the day (cortisol, adrenalin,… ) and starts cleaning things up while making other hormones to put your mind at ease (melatonin,…). But when your body finds itself being up past it’s bed time, it produces even more of those daytime-hormones, because it’s not sure what and how long its going to happen!
But then you finally decide to turn in and your brain is left with all these exes active, stressy hormones, thinking “well thanks for the heads-up, mate!” and needs a lot longer to clean everything up before your brain can go to sleep.
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