I require 8 hours of sleep to feel normal and refreshed. Due to family responsibilities and night shift work schedule, i get about 4 hours, in the middle of the day when my body naturally feels like it should be awake.
I make up for it by sleeping 12 hours on the nights I have off. It’s an extremely unhealthy schedule that leads to NEVER feeling like I’ve had an appropriate amount of sleep. Don’t know what else to do, though.
Only on weekends, when I can stay up as late as I want and sleep as late as I like. During the week, though, I have to get up at 10am every day (after going to bed around 3-4ish), and I’m a total night owl so that’s still way too early. Plus my body craves a full 8-9 hours of sleep, but I rarely get it because I can’t make myself go to bed before 3am.
Optimally I would stay up til 5-6am and wake up at 1-2pm every day without an alarm clock (as it is, I only get to do this on weekends, and only if I don’t have plans with my mom). I did get a chance to do that, for one semester in college (I got lucky with afternoon classes). I’ve never slept better in my life.
Typically, the longer I sleep, the less likely I will wake alert and the more likely I’ll feel tired and lethargic all day. up to 5 hours, I leap out of bed and silence the alarm before the second beep - 6 hours is OK. More than 8 hours and I’ll be yawning all day and possibly suffer headaches.
For several people in this thread it seems like a little knowledge of sleep stages would help. Specifically anyone who wakes up feeling bad after a nap or after more than their usual amount of sleep.
Quick and dirty - all sleep is not the same. When you first fall asleep you enter light (Stage 1 or 2) sleep. This usually lasts around 20 minutes. If you keep sleeping beyond this you will enter the deeper, more restorative stages of sleep (stage 3 and eventually stage 4). You will “come back up” from the initial stage 3 sleep a few times , at about 1 hour intervals until you enter a longer, deep sleep.
Why does this matter? If you take a nap and wake up after 20 minutes you feel great and refreshed - you got some sleep, but never entered a deeper sleep stage. Continue that nap for say 50 minutes and you wake up feeling worse than when you went to sleep. You pulled your body up out of a deep sleep stage, and you can feel it.
The same thing happens when you oversleep. Once you go through your entire normal sleep cycle (whatever that is for you - 6.5 hours, 8 hours, whatever) you will be up at stage 1 sleep and can wake up feeling great. Stay in bed sleeping more than 20-40 minutes past your normal sleep cycle and your body says “Sweet! More sleep!” and enters deep, restorative sleep again. Try to wake up during this and you feel crappy.
The goal is to wake up from stage 1 sleep so you don’t have that groggy, headachy feeling. If you lay down for a nap, set an alarm for 20-30 minutes from when you lay down. Experiment until you find what works for you. I can wake up at multiples of 20 minutes up until an hour and feel fine.
As for the people who never feel good, I’ll repeat what others have said and do some research on sleep apnea.
I have never slept well so have maintained an interest in the subject. Many people especially 40 onwards do not sleep well.
I find that a nana-nap of 40 minutes works but anything longer is too hard to rouse from.
I experience sleep apnoea which means 8 hours is more like 4 hours. I have tried earplugs to block out my snoring and it seems to help. I reluctantly use a half tablet of Zopiclone (Imovane) once a week and wake up reasonably refreshed but I have resisted relying on sleeping tablets for years because like all medication, the body adapts and you are no better off.
Oh- and in answer to the OP, yes certainly I’ve woken up refreshed. However its only been after a full day of physical labour and exhaustion. For example hiking (tramping as we call it) in the mountains with a heavy pack.
I woke this morning feeling refreshed - I was away for work on Monday night and had a bad night’s sleep, then had a very realistic nightmare on Tuesday night which kept me awake for a few hours. Last night I had a great sleep (woke up around 2am but that’s normal for me and doesn’t bother me) and felt refreshed this morning.
I find I’m less likely to feel refreshed if I’ve had too much sleep - I think it’s easy to get into a cycle of oversleeping and then mistaking that sleepy feeling for ‘needing more sleep’ when what you actually need is less sleep.
Unless I had sleep apnoea during the night (which I reckon I did last night), I’m pretty refreshed most days when I wake up now that Mother is on a sleeping tablet - she used to get out of bed at 2am and check the house for guests who hadn’t left (ie photos in newspapers and magazines - that I used to hide before I went to bed, but by feck she’d find something to start screaming at), then she’d get up proper at 6am and make a hullabaloo opening the living room door…