On average, a healthy adult has need to sleep between 7 and 9 hours a night. However, some will need more time to feel truly rested. For others, external factors can aggravate this feeling of difficulty emerging on waking. Because if a lack of sleep can cause fatigue, stress and overwork (at work for example) also have something to do with it. The psychological factor should not be neglected and fatigue on waking should be considered as an alarm bell: beware, non-restorative sleep can sometimes be a sign of depression. Do not hesitate to discuss it with your doctor if necessary.
But a state of fatigue that lasts for several weeks or months can also be the sign of a more or less serious pathology. Cancer, Covid-19, sleep apnea or thyroid disorder… Persistent fatigue on waking must be taken seriously.
The more waking phases we have at night, the more we want to sleep during the day.
All through the night, we chain 4 phases of sleep (falling asleep, slow slow-wave sleep, deep slow-wave sleep and paradoxical sleep) interspersed with very short periods of wakefulness that we are not always aware of. But sometimes these phases of awakening are more frequent than one would think, shortening our sleeping hours and generating fatigue the day. To put it simply: the more you have been awake during the night, the stronger the desire to sleep will be during the day.
This may be the case if you get up every night to pee. Even if you have the ability to fall back asleep immediately, these little nocturnal visits to the bathroom have repercussions on your day. According to urologists, people who get up at night to pee perform, on average, 24% worse at work than those who sleep like babies without getting up. The next time you see the doctor, have your blood pressure checked because getting up frequently at night to pee can be a sign of high blood pressure.
Do you wake up with a dry mouth or a migraine?
No need to blame the pollens or the foods you ate the night before. These signs may simply indicate that you have sleep apnea. Apneas are brief interruptions in breathing during sleep ; hypoapneas are reductions in breathing. But let’s be reassured… Everyone does one or the other from time to time without there being any vital risk at the time! Faced with the lack of oxygen, the brain triggers a micro-awakening reaction which restores tone to the respiratory tract and restores the flow of air, and therefore breathing. Apneas are abnormal when they last more than ten seconds and are repeated beyond 5 per hour. But it can be much more: some people do more than a hundred a night! If in doubt, consult your doctor.
Read also:Will the TikTok trend of taping your mouth really help you sleep better?
Do you run on coffee all day?
If the first thing you do when you wake up is to make yourself a double espresso and you feel a real need to drink coffee during the day to stay focused on what you are doing, this “caffeine craving” is probably a sign that you are not not sleep well.
The concern is that drinking a lot of coffee during the day causes some people to secrete cortisol (the stress hormone), which affects the quality of sleep. A study found that consuming caffeine 6 hours or 3 hours before going to bed disrupts sleep and even reduces sleep time by an hour. In short, you drink too much coffee so you sleep badly, which causes fatigue and encourages you to drink coffee again… And if you replace it with chicory?
Have you gained weight for no reason?
If the needle on the scale tends to point upwards even though you haven’t changed your diet, you’re probably sleep deprived. According to some researchers, a lack of sleep reduces our body’s level of leptin (the hormone that signals satiety to the brain and suppresses appetite) and increases the level of ghrelin (the hormone that stimulates hunger). In addition, too little or bad sleep leads to fatigue and a reduced desire to do physical activities, which then causes muscle wasting and lower energy expenditure, and finally an increase in fat mass.
Now that you know that your sleep is not of good quality, test these grandmother’s remedies tonight for better sleep or these natural recipes to find a good sleep without tranquilizers.
