Humans are not happy little puppies, ready to gambol and frisk about in the bright sunshine of a sunny new day. It’s perfectly normal to wake up grouchy, sluggish, depressed, or otherwise unhappy. As one gets older, there are a hell of a lot more reasons to do so! Myself? I wake up with awful anxiety as soon as I open my eyes. I worry about things, past, present, and future, and it all looks bad and frightening. There I am, ‘preparing for the worst’, and the day hasn’t even begun!
Part of this is because I can’t sleep well, I have insomnia, and when I do sleep, it’s restless and broken. So - if you are a lucky type who can fall asleep and stay that way, getting plenty of rest will work wonders. Meditation, deep breathing, even prayer for a few minutes is helpful, too.
I get up, make coffee, have a little something to eat for the low blood sugar, put on the TV and watch either the Today Show or an old movie while I check my e-mail, and by then, I’m feeling fine.
I have this too. It doesn’t bother me too much because I know that it wears off quite quickly after I get up and start my day (and that’s how I think about it, too - instead of, “Oh God, I feel like crap,” I aim for, “Well, I don’t feel great now, but I always feel better after breakfast.” I think it’s just a personal biorhythmic low.
I have intense agitation and anxiety upon waking. Sometimes I can feel it coming on before I am fully awake; I will be just coming out of a nice dream, and I can feel it start, as if someone is injecting Red Bull into my veins. Just for once, I would like to wake up rested and refreshed.
I don’t know if my morning mood is comparable to the OP’s, but I just cannot function as a social being the first 20 minutes after getting up. Before doing my bathroom routine, having breakfast and reading the paper, nobody should try to make conversation with me. Yes, you can ask me to hand the milk or a piece of the paper, but don’t try to have any kind of small talk or worse, discuss big issues before I have finished breakfast. You won’t get much more than some angry grunts.
The solution: just leave me alone for those 20 minutes. After that, I will be acting like any reasonable human being, and I don’t use to be moody at all for the rest of the day.
I have been living alone for the last 6 years, so this isn’t really an issue for me at the moment, but when I had housemates, this was the only strategy that worked. It may sound selfish, and I admit that it is difficult if you have a familiy, but either you don’t talk to me at all for that time, or it won’t be a very funny or prolific conversation.
I always had a miserable time waking up. Alarms were useless. When I was a kid, my mom tried everything to wake me up and nothing worked. This caused a lot of problems in school, especially college, and I had trouble at work because I was constantly late. Adding to the frustration was that folks assumed I was lazy or not going to bed at a reasonable time. I’d wake up with headaches, often in a bad mood, and often that lousy start would derail my entire day.
When I was in my late-30s I had a sleep study done, and found out that I had a delayed onset of REM sleep. I could sleep all night, but sometimes never get into restful sleep. So I’d wake up after 8 or 9 hours and feel exhausted.
The problem was solved fairly easily with over the counter medication and some fairly innocuous lifestyle changes. I wake easily now. I don’t even have an alarm clock, and when I wake up I’m anxious to get out of bed and get going. I feel like a different person, and I wish I’d found this solution 30 years earlier.
My advice, for what it’s worth, is that if you’re miserable in the morning, you look into having a sleep study done. It’s a fairly common test these days (with the growth of sleep apnea cases), and it could lead to a very substantial improvement in your quality of life.
I was referred to a sleep clinic, who asked me some questions about snoring, which I generally don’t. Since I didn’t snore, they said I didn’t have a sleep disorder that they could treat, and I was sent on my way.
I get 6 hours of sleep per night, maximum. If I go to bed at 11, I wake up at 5. If I go to bed at 10, I wake up at 4. I try to stay up as late as I can, usually 11:30 to 12, just so I won’t wake up so damn early.