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You're tired? Try being at work and dozing off every second! arg! And only going on the net seems to wake me up!
Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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It has to do with how long the naps are, from what I've read. If you nap longer than, say, 15 or 20 minutes you'll go into REM cycles and if you're interrupted before it finishes you'll feel tired.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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Sick...and tired...of love... (sorry Blayne, this is an entirely unrelated lyric from a song that your title made me think of)
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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Blayne Bradley
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I am recovering from a nasty flu virus that tried to take over my body until the super White Blood cell came along and saved the day!
And I don't drink coffee, coffee is a drug.
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quote:Originally posted by El JT de Spang: It has to do with how long the naps are, from what I've read. If you nap longer than, say, 15 or 20 minutes you'll go into REM cycles and if you're interrupted before it finishes you'll feel tired.
Interesting. If your nap is too short for REM sleep, does it do you any good at all?
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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Blayne Bradley
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Hatrack is a medicinal drug though, or thats what I tell the police when they discover a baggy of Hatrack in my car.
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My impression was that it had to do with sleep cycles, with waking during the wrong phase of the cycle resulting in grogginess. REM sleep, I understood, was actually a fairly good stage from which to wake.
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I'm finding a lot of sites that support what I understand to be the case, but none so far that I'd feel comfortable pointing to as an actual source.
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There are 4 stages of sleep, and then REM sleep (which is a fifth stage, but isn't called stage 5 for some reason). My understanding was that it was easier, and better, to be awakened during stages 1 and 2 than in 3, 4, and REM.
But it does have to do with where you are in your cycle when you wake up that affects how tired you feel. And the exact length of the cycles vary from person to person. For some reason 30 minutes sticks in my mind as the longest you should nap without it making you sluggish when you wake up.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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Personally, I always feel exceptionally groggy after a nap but within 5-10 minutes afterward, I feel alert and refreshed and happy that I chose to nap. I guess the key, for me, is to not squeeze naps in timewise. Just like sleeping, allow some time for reorientation (and if you don't need it, I'm envious).
On when to wake up:
Sleep cycles between 4 levels and REM, with the crest being REM. When you fall asleep, you rapidly drop to a 'gamma' level, which is the deepest state of unconsciousness. To be woken up during that stage would definitely invoke grogginess. The fourth (alpha) stage is the lightest level of of non-REM sleep. The ideal time to be awakened is REM, as you are closest to consciousness. However, you cycle through the 4 about 7 times, and you sleep less deeply as you go on (eg. you only enter gamma once or twice, both initially).
My unscientific hypothesis: Maybe 15-20 mins is how long it takes to go from the first 'deep sleep' back to REM? That is why that is considered the only productive way to nap?
Posts: 484 | Registered: Feb 2006
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The same thing happens to me sometimes, most often when I've reset my alarm for an extra 20-30 minutes of sleep. I rarely remember dreams from before the initial alarm, but I'll notice dreams in that last sleep chunk with much greater frequency.
Perhaps the fact that I'm a very heavy sleeper has something to do with it?
Posts: 952 | Registered: Jun 2005
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quote: I have had dreams even when I've only slept for 5-10 minutes. Sometimes several dreams.
I find I have the most vivid and interesting dreams during naps. It makes for something fun to think about during the rest of the day. Usually during normal sleep I don't dream at all, but for some reason naps make me dream prolificly.
Posts: 1789 | Registered: Jul 2003
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Heh, I just woke up from a nap precisely 20 minutes after I fell asleep. It was like my brain paid attention to this discussion! I never do that (and yes, I do feel great).
Posts: 484 | Registered: Feb 2006
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I always feel like complete crap after a nap. I am totally wasted for the rest of my waking period. Even four or five hours after the nap I am debilitated.
It doesn't seem to matter how quickly I wake up. I have sleep apnea though, and wake up 5 times an hour on average even when I am sleeping at night. Wonder if that has something to do with it.
Posts: 5656 | Registered: Oct 1999
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As I understand it, sleep apnea can seriously disrupt your sleep cycle, because it prevents you from getting into the deep sleep that you need every night. It's like you're napping all night every night but you're not really getting rested.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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Um, Xavier, it does. But your apnea causes you to wake up only 5 times an hour? That's not that bad - it falls under very mild apnea - but probably still needs treatment. Do you use a CPAP machine?
Here's what happens when you have an apneic event...
You stop breathing. Because your oxygen levels are dropping (mine went from 97% to under 80%). Your heart speeds up (mine jumped from 40 bpm to 160 bpm almost instantly) to compensate for the lack of oxygen, but it doesn't work. You struggle to breathe, and finally start breathing again (an apneic event is defined as a minimum of 10 seconds of not breathing, so anything below that doesn't count. I "held my breath" for as long as 4 minutes 23 seconds in my sleep - much longer than I ever could while awake.)
It's a struggle, a fight for your life. Do you really wonder why you wake up exhausted?
And El JT is right in that apnea disrupts the sleep cycles.
Every time you have an apneic event, you're kicked from whatever sleep stage you were in back to Stage 1, that stage where you cannot differentiate between being awake or being asleep, which is why you probably aren't conscious of your apneic events.
Your sleep is supposed to cycle through all the stages, but when you're constantly kicked into Stage 1, you never actually make it through the cycle properly. My untreated apnea made sure I rarely, if ever, achieved Stage 4 and REM.
The brain needs to go through all stages in order to feel rested and rejuvenated.
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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I took a nap today that started in the car on the way home at 5:30 (I wasn't driving, don't worry) woke up 15 minutes later to get into my house, and went back up to sleep and woke up at around 8:30. I feel real good now. I like naps.
Edit: actually it was two naps in my house. First I fell asleep on the couch downstairs and then was woken up from noise, and then I went to my bed and finished the nap until 8:30. But I feel refreshed, even though I couldn't of gotten far in the sleep stages since it was 3 naps.
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