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Get rid of sleep inertia forever

Sleep inertia is a physiological state of impaired cognitive and sensory-motor performance that is present immediately after waking up. It persists during the transition of sleep to wakefulness, where you will feel drowsiness, disorientation and a decline in motor dexterity.

Logically, if you have slept badly (not enough time or of poor quality), your inertia will be stronger. But sleep inertia happens even to the best sleepers since it does not solely depend on those factors. Here are the main causes of sleep inertia:

  • Inertia partly comes from the dehydration of our body during sleep since we are unable to drink enough water for long periods of time.
  • Sleep inertia is also due to the adaptation time that our body needs in order to restart some of its mechanisms after a period of partial inactivity. And a large part of the mechanisms that need a restart is triggered by biological events governed by the circadian rhythm (natural light/darkness cycle of the planet).
  • One of the reasons is also that we usually do not wake up in the right sleep stage due to our alarm clocks. Sleep is composed of different stages that can be summarized by light, deep and REM stages. Waking up during REM and especially deep will increase our inertia. The human being is programmed to wake up naturally at the end of its sleep stage, but our alarm clocks prevent just that from happening. 

The solutions to reducing inertia upon waking-up therefore naturally result from the origins of our problem.

  • First and foremost, we obviously need a good night's sleep and I invite you to read the Circular blog where there are many articles that will help you better understand and improve your sleep.
  • We should drink plenty of water as soon as we wake up to rehydrate and maintain the level of water our body needs to function properly. Water is essential for all vital processes. Eating as soon as we wake up is also very important to restart our internal system and provide the necessary energy to our body.
  • Although it seems contradictory to our problems, getting quickly into action after waking up is very useful to restart the mechanisms of our body as quickly as possible.
  • To restart our cognitive mechanisms, we also need to expose ourselves to natural sunlight (or an artificial lamp if there is not much sun where you live).
  • And finally, it is preferable to wake up in a light sleep stage where you will feel rested and alert.

But you wonder how we can wake up in a light sleep stage since we set our alarm clock to a fixed time that will wake us whether we are in deep sleep or light sleep.

For this, we need to use a smart alarm clock. You can read about the solution offered by the Circular ring “Circular® smart alarm clock: Wake up with motivation and energy and get rid of sleep inertia”

Laurent Bsalis

Laurent is passionate about biohacking and tries his best to be a better version of himself. He also eats too much ice cream which is a problem.

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