If you don’t have a good reason to wake up early, the extra sleep time may not be as beneficial as you hoped.
Instead, you'd better just stay awake because you've been interrupting your 90-minute sleep cycle, so sliding into sleep can make you feel lethargic and irritable.
“It’s usually good if you’re going to sleep until you wake up naturally because you’re in the natural cycle. But when you fall asleep and wake up, you have a great chance of waking up at a deeper sleep stage when you’re not going to wake up,” Dr. Greg Mahr, Henry Ford Health henry Ford ford health herry ford health ford ford ford health henry ford ford health henry ford ford health heard of henry ford ford ford ford health '''''' independent. “You’re really sleepy because you haven’t experienced the natural rhythm yet.”
He said the brain changes were “quite obvious”, watching the recording of brain activity.
When you interrupt those deeper sleep phases, recovery may take a while to recover, while waking up at other lighter sleep phases won’t produce the same results. This is true even if you can technically accept enough sleep.
An extra hour of sleep may not give you the benefits you want. The reason is related to the circadian rhythm of the human body (Getty Images/Istock)
“This is not usually listening to our body cycles, but trying to cover them because of our schedules and alarm clocks,” Mahr noted.
Alarm clocks can play an important role in sleep health. Recent studies have found that more than 50% of the 3 million sleep classes studied ended with “snooze.” According to Brigham, PhD, a sleep scientist at the Women's Hospital and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, people spend an average of 11 minutes between snooze alarms, an average of 20 minutes a day before they wake up.
“Unfortunately, the snooze alarm disrupts some of the most important sleep phases. Sleep quickly moves in the few hours of waking up. Hitting the snooze alarm interrupts these critical sleep phases, often only providing you with a light sleep between snooze alarms.”
How many alarms you set can also be a red flag, says Dr. Rachel Salas, MD, Johns Hopkins.
“If you are a person with 10 police officers, that's a huge red flag. If you have to press the snooze button and don't wake up, it's a red flag, something can happen when you sleep, you don't know,” she explained. “You may have an undiagnosed untreated sleep disorder.”
Searching for alerts can be a major disruption. It interrupts the critical phase of sleep (Getty Images/Istock)
People may not be able to control their variable working schedules or environmental conditions. But, can they crack the system? Can you sleep secretly without feeling the effect? Saras said you can.
“Sleeping at less than an hour before 3pm (ideally 20 or 30 minutes) is a way to repay, not affecting another process important for the continuous sleep of the circadian rhythm. This is called a steady-state drive.” Otherwise, you can put yourself in a vicious sleep cycle.
However, there is a way to make sure you are as fresh as possible.
“The best way to optimize sleep and performance on the next day is to set up an alarm at the latest possible time and then promise to wake up when the first alarm sounds,” Robbins said.
