Even with the full 8 waking up and moving around at the start of the day is fatiguing. Even when we are young.
In: 167
There’s a chemical that your brain produces called Melatonin, and it makes you feel sleepy.
Your brain builds melatonin at night and gradually gets rid of it in the morning when the sunlight hits your eyes.
If you live an area in the world where sunrise is quite late in the morning or if you use black out blinds, your brain will not activate the process to break down the Melatonin cause your blocking the morning light.
That’s one factor, your body clock can be another reason.
Do you drink coffee? I was always very groggy before I drank coffee in the morning. Now that I don’t drink coffee, I don’t get groggy.
Another factor which may or may not affect you depending on whether you drink coffee is adenosine receptors. Coffee blocks the adenosine (feel sleepy neuro Chem) receptors. Repeated caffeine intake makes your brain compensate by making more receptors. After a while of regular coffee use, when you wake up after sleeping, your body has not had caffeine in some hours and all of those adenosine receptors are free to be populated with adenosine. If you’ve ever quit coffee suddenly, you might have noticed an urge to just sleep constantly for multiple days until your body adjusts. I personally love Caffeine and coffee but have experienced this adenosine fatigue before which has caused me to take regular breaks from coffee and reduce my overall intake which leads to feeling way less groggy in the early wake up phases.
Another factor which may or may not affect you depending on whether you drink coffee is adenosine receptors. Coffee blocks the adenosine (feel sleepy neuro Chem) receptors. Repeated caffeine intake makes your brain compensate by making more receptors. After a while of regular coffee use, when you wake up after sleeping, your body has not had caffeine in some hours and all of those adenosine receptors are free to be populated with adenosine. If you’ve ever quit coffee suddenly, you might have noticed an urge to just sleep constantly for multiple days until your body adjusts. I personally love Caffeine and coffee but have experienced this adenosine fatigue before which has caused me to take regular breaks from coffee and reduce my overall intake which leads to feeling way less groggy in the early wake up phases.
That assumes you are actually getting 8 hours of good rest. Many people have undiagnosed sleep apnea and that will certainly account for rough morning starts.
Another factor which may or may not affect you depending on whether you drink coffee is adenosine receptors. Coffee blocks the adenosine (feel sleepy neuro Chem) receptors. Repeated caffeine intake makes your brain compensate by making more receptors. After a while of regular coffee use, when you wake up after sleeping, your body has not had caffeine in some hours and all of those adenosine receptors are free to be populated with adenosine. If you’ve ever quit coffee suddenly, you might have noticed an urge to just sleep constantly for multiple days until your body adjusts. I personally love Caffeine and coffee but have experienced this adenosine fatigue before which has caused me to take regular breaks from coffee and reduce my overall intake which leads to feeling way less groggy in the early wake up phases.
You might just not be a morning person. Some people take a long time to fully wake up and feel the most energized later in the day or at night.
You might just not be a morning person. Some people take a long time to fully wake up and feel the most energized later in the day or at night.
Sleep debt is real and it’s a debt that always gets paid. Another option might be dehydration. Even though everything in your body slows down, it’s still running. You are still sweating a little, kidneys are still flushing out the toxins. That’s why you pee first thing in the morning. It’s trying to find the balance between drinking enough water to stay hydrated but not so much water that you have to get up half way through and pee.
There was an article recently saying that humans are not really built for 8 hours of straight sleep. The traditional sleep pattern up until the late 1800s was two 4 hour sleep periods with about an hour awake in between. It was called 1st sleep and 2nd sleep. The in between time people would use to read, pray, have sex, or just talk. It was so common in the 1700s that people would go talk to neighbors.
It wasn’t until the modern work schedules and electric lighting that the solid sleep block really developed. When we sleep today we still have 4 hour sleep blocks, usually a 1/2 hour of light sleep before slipping into REM sleep, then back to light sleep for a while then another REM cycle before waking.
There are a couple of phone apps that use your smart watch to keep track of where you are in your sleep cycle and adjust your alarm slightly to go off when you are in a lighter phase of sleeping.
If you’re waking up tired after 8 hours it’s possible you’re not actually sleeping anywhere close to 8 hours. Consider getting a sleep study. You could be waking up every few minutes with sleep apnea or something.
Latest Answers