Hmm…
Cecil’s question of Feb 5, 1999 left much to be desired in terms of an actual answer. All Cecil did was restate what the author did- that people are either groggy after sleeping too much, or they’re not. And that there’s a name for this. Oh, and that some people believe this idea and some people don’t.
But really, what’s the real reason why sleeping too much causes grogginess in most of us?
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a990205.html
I kind of agree, although he pretty clearly says that’s
all anybody who’s studied it can conclude. There’s a name
for it; maybe it’s a real effect, maybe it’s not.
A double-blind test would be interesting, where people
were kept away from any clues as to what time it was, and
researchers asked them to go to sleep, and others, who
didn’t know how long they’d been sleeping, woke them up.
I get the feeling nobody’s going to fund something that
involved to answer the question at hand, though, and that’s
why I find society so wanting in its priorities.
That was WEAK ! I expected to get a crash course in sleep cycles, brain chemicals associated with sleep, etc. Whatever the studies say, there must be associated evidence with why you would feel “groggy” or not. Come on Cecil, a classic should be a GOOD answer!! (unless it’s a classic example of a weak answer?)
I usually feel guilty after I sleep for what feels like too long, and count on guilt to slow me down. When it feels like the day is wasting away, I don’t feel motivated to do anything. It’s different if I go to bed at 10 pm and wake up at 8 am then if I go to bed at 2 am and wake up at noon. Maybe the grogginess is a result of that feeling. What do you think?
I remember reading in some quite reliable but unremembered source that the body, with it’s reduced rate of breathing, is less efficient at expelling carbon monoxide while we sleep. The groggy feeling comes from an accumulation of CO in the blood, making it less able to carry oxygen. A short walk with some deep breathing sure seems to clear me right up.
i think the answer lies in whether you are sleeping late, or trying to sleep late. i myself have sleep apnea, so my quality of sleep is below the norm. because of this, i can sleep anywhere from 10 to 15 hours per night on the weekends (i think my record is around 18). sometimes i feel groggy, but sometimes i feel great. i think what separates those two feeling is your motivation. if you get out of bed when you first wake up, you usually feel pretty good. but if you lack the motivation to get out of bed and face the day, you can eventually force yourself back to sleep. but when you force yourself, your body gets restless from trying to sleep when it isn’t that tired in the first place, thus consuming more energy than is being stored. this makes us feel like crap when we finally get up. does anyone else relate to this?
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I always thought that sleeping modulated your natural serotonin levels. And that if you sleep in, it screws up the “normal” cycle. Therefore it is best to go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day. If you stay up late and sleep in late on the weekends, this screws up the cycle, which causes some people to go groggy. They (sleep experts) say if you need more sleep, don’t sleep in. You should just go to be earlier. You should always strive to wake up at the same time every day.
There appears to be far more anectotal evidence in this than any proper scientific study.
When I was a student (long ago! Well, only last year) I used to get up mid morning or later depending on how much I’d had to drink the night before and what time my first lecture was. More or less a different time each day. These days though, since I started working, and have to get up at the same time 5 days a week I always wake up around the same time automatically on a weekend (even if I’m hungover!!!), though I can fall asleep again if I don’t get out of bed (and is probably a good idea with a hangover).
I tend to feel better in the mornings these days, but I think its more to do with less drinking and doing an interesting job, than how late I sleep.
That’s my tuppence worth anyway.
It seems to me the answer was “There is no answer.” Kinda sucks, but that’s the way it is sometimes - nobody knows. But that makes for a short column.
I thought this was a pretty unsatisfactory column myself. I have “terminal phase insomnia” (I sometimes wake up 2 hours or more before I want to, and it makes my day just crummy) so sleep is a subject near and dear to my heart. I read once that the “Rip Van Winkle Effect” was because near the end of a really long night’s sleep you go into an abnormally long REM cycle, and that’s just plain tiring. And I’ve also read that on the night after you haven’t slept enough, you have an unusually long deep sleep phase. (So you don’t have to make up all the lost sleep!) So that’s my guess.
And as a purely anecdotal note, I rarely sleep more than 9-10 hours no matter what. But once in college, for no apparent reason, I slept 13 hours one night. This never happens so I had no expectations at all-actually I would have expected to feel great, and I was quite surprised to find that I felt groggy and disoriented the whole day.
(Off topic, can anyone tell me why I need more and more sleep as I get older? I’m up to 8 1/2 hours a night now, when 7 1/4 was plenty 10 years ago. I don’t have time for this!)
Has anyone considered dehydration? 13 hours of sleep is 13 hours of not drinking, and at least 7 hours of lying under warm covers during the heat of day. You can easily dry out quite severely without feeling “thirsty”.
Alessan, I was just about to post that. Dehydration is the #1 reason I feel gross and/or groggy when I sleep too much. If I know I’m going to be sleeping long, such as on the weekends, I try to drink as much water as possible before sleeping. Of course, this has the added effect of needing to break sleep to go to the bathroom, but there you go. 
I never feel as bad when I wake up.
Another possible problem for some people is motionlessness. In certain circumstances I tend not to move around in my sleep very much - when I wake up I am stiff and sore as a result, and really not raring to go. Combine that with dehydration and I’m sure that too much sleep wouldn’t improve anyone’s outlook. Still, this only applies to some of the people some of the time.
Appelle
I think its dehydration. After I drink some water and exercise a little I feel fine, no matter how much extra sleep I had.
But guys, the question is about the DIFFERENCE between oversleeping and correcting a sleep deficit! Besides, it’s pretty esy to correct dehydration (or for that matter, hypoglycemia from an equally prolonged fast.) So I don’t think that elucidates much.
So now you want an answer to why you feel tired when oversleeping…
Ya brain is kinda, one of the few things humans STILL dont understand YET…
ppl can be shot in the head and live, some have pains thats only mental… so why cant we just explain that
thats fairly simple than the stuff going on in your brain when sleeping
and until we fully understand the human brain then you cant get a clear answer
(rememeber its better than our computers and most of our best research have gone into them)
King Al, maybe I missed some deeper sarcasm here, but assuming I didn’t…Nobody is claiming that science knows everything about the brain. We are just seeking an answer to this one question. Neurologists know a lot more about the brain than you may be giving them credit for. Having had two graduate-level classes in it, I can assure you that they have more information on the physiology and wiring of the brain than you would believe possible.
For instance, the brain activities in a typical night’s sleep have been pretty well mapped out, as well as some common screwups in an insomniac’s brain (the sleep specialist wants to do a sleep study on me, and I just can’t warm up to the idea of spending the night in a lab with a bunch of monitors hooked up to me.) This is what I was alluding to in my first post. I don’t quite get what your observation about people getting shot in the head and surviving has to do with anything.
(Referring, of course, to the groggy after oversleeping thread.)
This is an interesting one! I’m an expert on sleep and alertness in the real world (and a specialist in biocompatible shift schedules for folks working 24 hour ops), and I was surprised that none of the reasons and explanations offered by Cecil and others explains the major reason people wake up feeling groggy.
Before I can explain why people do sometimes wake up groggy, I need to give you a fast lesson in sleep dynamics. There are five main stages of sleep: stages one and two, which are light sleep; stages three and four, which are deep sleep; and stage five, which is REM sleep (when we primarily dream.) During a sleep cycle of roughly 1.5 hours, you typically start in stage one and sink in stages down to stage four, after which you rise in stages back up to shallow sleep; at this point, you usually enter REM sleep and dream. Dropping down and coming back up takes 90-100 minutes for most people.
Light sleep is awfully easy to wake up from, since your brainwaves are very close to your normal “awake” brain waves: short, sharp and fast. Deep sleep is much more difficult to wave up from because you’ve slipped into much stage 3 or stage 4 sleep, and your brain waves have changed accordingly to long, slow delta waves. Waking up from deep sleep (stages 3-4) will typically leave you feeling groggy and disjointed, perhaps with a headache. This feeling (technically called “sleep inertia” will persist between 20 minutes to an hour after waking, and is caused by the lag as your brainwaves shift from the long slow delta waves of deep sleep to the short sharp “awake” brainwaves. During this time, your reaction times and judgement will be slightly off, and you’ll probably feel lousy.
Normally, people wake up naturally out of light sleep; you’ll see this when you wake up from a dream and feel awake and alert, as your brainwaves while dreaming are almost identical to the way they look when you’re awake. However, if you stay in bed for longer than normal, your biological clock will be trying to get you up and moving by all sorts of physiological measures: raising your blood pressure and body temperature, getting your digestive system running, reminding you that you have to go the bathroom. Thus, when you sleep later than normal the chances increase that you’ll be dragged awake during a period of deep sleep. When this happens, you’ll feel lousy, but if you got dragged awake during light sleep or a dream you’d feel just fine. And there, folks, is the secret answer. It’s all about the timing of what sleep cycle you wake up from.
This whole phenomena also explains something else most people notice but can’t explain. You ever wake up naturally before the alarm goes off, be alert, but decide to get another 20 minutes of sleep… and then you feel awful when the alarm does go off? During that extra time, you’ve slipped from light sleep back down into stage 3 or 4. As a result, you’re usually better off if you just get up when you wake up naturally.
So, I hope this is some help. Any comments, arguments, questions?
we finally got an expert on the subject. welcome Piratecat, and good post!
Thank you, Piratecat. Exactly the sort of thing we were looking for. Makes perfect sense.