Brain in gear, but tired?

[Rroff]

I get that quite mentally focussed effect from insufficient sleep under those kind of circumstances but there is a background lack of energy that can be counter productive for longer tasks or physical tasks and I hit a wall after around 10 hours or so and crash.

Most people benefit from more optimised sleeping rather than just lots of sleep but the answer isn't sleeping less hours - in the long run that can really harm your health even though it might give a short term boost. Actually sleeping optimal patterns though is really hard as most people can't just drop off on demand and even devices that try to measure your sleeping state and wake you at the best moment aren't that good.

 

[GGizmo]

So you're saying the cortisol is good for sleep recovery, and for kicking off the day?

It's more the adrenal glands that is our natural body clock. A lot of times we fight our body clocks because we're in our routines. But if we listened to our bodies we'd be at peak alertness.

I think its the same with most people that we wake up in bed and its 50/50 whether we want to get up, so we have another 5, 10 err 20 minutes, alarm goes off again and now we really don't want to wake up but we have to.

On the flip side have you ever felt tired at 10pm and decided to stay up longer. But later on you now feel wide awake? That's because we had another cortisol shot but we was awake so then its more difficult to get to sleep.

 

[UTmaniac]

Margaret Thatcher only used to sleep 5 hours.

Proof right there, you need 7+ hours on average to function properly.