Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles Sleeping is the best! Waking up is the worst! Just five more minutes, Mom. But that never really helps, does it? Hey there, snoozers. Trace here for Dnews. Thanks for watching and check this out-- new set! It's awesome. I had a roommate in college whose alarm went off at 7:15 for his 8 am class. The radio as loud as the volume would go, he didn't even flinch or wake up. But I almost hit the ceiling, it scared me so much. We've done a lot of videos on sleep. We even actually have a sleep playlist you can check out. But waking up... some days I just don't wanna get up. Social jet lag, or the idea we have to wake up before our natural rhythms want us to wake up, affects 70 percent of the population, according to a study in Current Biology. And difficulty waking up is called sleep inertia. A 2013 study in PlosOne describes it as, "a temporary period of reduced alertness and impaired performance." Scientific symptoms of sleep inertia are poor memory and reaction time, inability to perform basic math and the suffering of alertness or attention. These symptoms can persist for an hour and usually occurs when you wake up during slow-wave sleep. Sleep comes to humans in order across four stages: Stage 1 is the transition from wakefulness to a light sleep. During this 5 to 10 minute stage, the electrical signals pulsing through your brain form theta waves. The next 20 minutes is Stage 2. The brain is producing rapid bursts of activity called sleep spindles, and the heart rate slows, and body temperature fluctuates and dips. Stage 3 is slow-wave sleep or delta sleep. This lasts about an hour, and brain activity comes in the form of delta waves. People in this stage aren't responsive when you call their name, and abnormal behaviors like bed-wetting or sleepwalking are a part of the end of this stage. That's where you get to Stage 4, that's famous REM sleep when dreams happen, everybody knows about that! When you fall asleep, you go through stage one and then to stage two. Then three, four, then back to two. Then three, four, then back to two. You'll do this four to five times in a night of sleep. If your alarm goes off when you're in stage three, the deepest of sleep, then you'll be jolted awake, and you'll get the worst of sleep inertia! This is usually when people describe like they were being "hit by a truck" when they wake up. The hormones surging through your body that keep you in a deep sleep are still floating around, affecting your now awake body. Sleep inertia is still being studied, it was only named in the late 70s So, say it with me now, MORE RESEARCH IS NEEDED! But what we do know is the best medicine is to get out of bed and turn on the lights and get going because the retina is directly connected to the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN. The SCN controls our sleep-wake cycle and the release of melatonin, which is a hormone that triggers the sleeping part of the sleep/wake cycle. Your phone, that doesn't count. You need to actually get up and see some daylight. It's true that at night the blue light from your phone and your tablet screens mess with your SCN regulation of that sleep/wake cycle. So don't use them before you go to sleep. But a study in PlosOne found that increasing that blue light in the morning doesn't increase brain alertness during sleep inertia. So, grabbing your phone first thing isn't gonna save you. Also, the snooze button is NOT your friend. If you're jolted from slow-wave sleep and allow your brain to drop into sleep again, you're gonna start the whole sleep cycle over, causing you to feel even worse. And don't set alarms every half an hour, you're not gradually waking yourself up. You're interrupting and restarting your sleep cycle over and over again. I'm guilty of this, so are many of you. It is the worst, just stop it. Like everything, having a healthy sleep/wake cycle requires effort -- like running a race, we have to train to be good at it. Waking up is no different. You can set one alarm, you can make yourself wake up when it goes off. And it's gonna be terrible for a while, but it'll get better. Take down the blackout curtains so you get some daylight and that will help because your retinas will tell your SCN it's wakeup time. If you wake up early on the weekend too, you won't throw off your weekday sleep schedule! A morning routine is the best. And everyone is different. But luckily, wakefulness is actually really easy to train, but only you can do it. I used to be a night owl, I'd be up till two, three in the morning, and wake up mid-day. But having to be up to everyday for DNews has made me a morning person in some ways, and it's completely changed my sleep/wake cycle. And you know what? I kind of love it. Do you wanna change your sleep schedule? Go head and tell us about it down below. Leave some tips if you got some, and make sure you subscribe for more Dnews.
B1 US sleep wake stage inertia waking cycle Why Is Waking Up So Hard? 49433 2833 Jonathan Tan posted on 2022/05/01 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary