Five More Minutes, Mommy

A week or so ago, I thought about my being a night owl and how it's generally been a struggle for me to get up in the morning bright-eyed and alert. I've been doing quite well in my acclimation here in my new country, and I felt "waking up early" was my last hurdle in my quest to establish a new routine.

I tried. Really, I tried. Alarms as early as half past five or six, and two others at thirty-minute intervals because I knew myself enough to anticipate that I would hit snooze on all of them except the last one. (Unless it's Sunday. I tend to just ignore everything on Sundays, then panic because how is it already nine and we're attending mass at ten. Anyway.)

My efforts improved my time, so at least by now I'm consistently able to be up at seven. But this state remains my default:

And I genuinely wondered if something was wrong with me. I'd sit up after my six-thirty alarm, but not actually move and get off the bed to do anything until another half hour later. Why were mornings so hard?

My brother, bless him, told me (when he found out) that my feeling's completely normal. It's actually something called sleep inertia, and it's a natural part of our sleep-wake cycle. It's simply the transition from sleep to wakefulness. And, fun fact: it may take up to 90 minutes for the grogginess to dissipate. Hurray, the feeling has a name! And my three alarms make sense, falling well within those number of minutes!

The root cause, though? Our brains. Yeah, them again. Sleep inertia is actually caused by adenosine, a sleep-promoting chemical in our brains. It builds up during the day to induce drowsiness, allowing us to go into deep sleep at night. Our brains purge that chemical from our bodies during sleep, but adenosine takes a while to burn off. The adenosine leftovers in our brain are what trigger sleep inertia.

As much as I dislike these feelings of grogginess, wanting to wake up full of energy and enthusiasm so I could work on everything I need to work on, sleep inertia is said to help us go back to sleep when we're disturbed at night by, say, wanting to go to the bathroom. Or being jolted awake by a noise that turns out to be nothing. Our bodies need sleep, and our brains know it. Hence, sleep inertia.

So don't fret if you're like me! We're okay. We're normal.

While we're on the topic of sleep, here are a few more things I learned recently:

• There is actually a thing called sleep debt. It's the amount of sleep we owe our bodies over the last two weeks. High sleep debt increases sleep inertia, so one of the best ways to be less groggy is to, you got it, get enough sleep.
• Then there's recovery sleep, which is sleeping in after staying up too late the night before. Recovery sleep reduces sleep debt, but also increases sleep inertia. (I'm starting to sound like a math person.)
• Sunlight actually, physically, not metaphorically, signals our brains that the it's time to wake up. Plus it warms our bodies. Our core body temperatures in fact drop when we sleep, so waking up does the opposite. Evidently this is a problem for those who work at night and sleep during the day, or when the winter months roll around...
• And there's such a thing called social jetlag, when our biological clocks are at odds with our social clocks. Studies have shown that more than one hour of social jetlag can increase the likelihood of obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure. So my father has had the right idea all along. He consistently goes to bed at ten, whether it's a weekday or a weekend.

Here's to sleeping better and living better.