Many people, including myself, somehow wake up feeling tired. As if all that sleep you’ve just had is worthless.
A lot of things happen as soon as you wake up, such as your breathing and heart rate speeding up, and your blood flowing around your body faster. Your brain will start producing different kinds of brainwaves and chemicals, all to prepare your body and get you ready for the day ahead.
When you sleep, you experience something called REM sleep, it’s where all the dreaming goes on and we’ve spoken about it in a different article. If you really want to see REM sleep in action, just look at your dogs eyes flickering when they’re fast asleep, this is them dreaming! REM stands for rapid eye movement and not getting enough of it is why you’ll wake up feeling a bit groggy. Over a long period of time, a lack of REM sleep can have some seriously strange and nasty health effects, but we won’t get into that right now.
So you may be wondering, how do I wake up feeling less groggy? Well, firstly, you need to get enough sleep. Think of us and phones and sleep is us re-charging. If we don’t get enough sleep, we aren’t fully charged. Sleep is essentially repair mode for humans. Adults should get around 7-9 hours of sleep a night, and I know that a lot of you reading this will be wondering when the last time you got that much sleep was. But even with that amount of sleep, you may still wake up feeling tired… so what else can I do?
You shouldn’t eat a lot before you sleep, and making your blood sugar levels spike before bed can make you have some pretty poor quality sleep.
Another reason why you might be having some bad sleep is because you’re dehydrated. Keep water near your bed! This is a common reason why people feel sluggish in the mornings.
Some exercise throughout the day is good for mind and body, even if it’s just a moderately long walk. Your blood gets extra oxygenated when exercising which is good for your heart and brain and helps sleep.
This is a very easy one, turn off notifications on your phone! You may think you don’t notice them, but these little buzzes and pings can seriously interrupt your sleep.
Don’t hit the snooze button as well, little periods of sleep like this do absolutely NOTHING for your body, and they actually can ruin that good sleep you just had.
I hope this has helped anyone that also feels like a zombie in the morning, and here’s an extra one before we wrap up this article, stretching and not slouching about can make you feel so much better. Because after all you’ve been barely moving for 7 hours, it’s definitely helpful to stretch!
