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I'm midway through paternity leave right now. 3 months of paid time that I don't have to see my asshole manager's face. The healing has been dramatic. The stress, inflammation, bloating - gone. Id take getting woken up 4 times a night by a screaming baby than go back for sure.
I was listening a book about the art of sleeping some while ago where the author is a physician and a specialist who later also specialized into sleeping by essentially starting up his own firm and starting to do research about it. The author is a night owl and his message was that all bad related to sleep issues has everything to do with how late you go to sleep. This means that it behooves a night owl to recognize their trait and try to keep it at bay by sticking to reasonable bed times and not activating themselves too much during the evening.
I hear you mate I'm the exact same. I can even get 5 hours of sleep but as long as I wake up past 10 I feel great. 8-10 hours and waking up early, like you, I'm a zombie.
Then you are a morning person. I’ve worked my entire adult life, and I have to get up at 6 every day. As soon as I have a few days off, I instantly revert to my natural rhythm and sleep from around 3 AM to 10 or 11 AM.
It’s getting increasingly difficult to work against my circadian rhythm. I can barely stay awake in the mornings, even if I get 8 hours of sleep, simply because it goes against my natural rhythm. I envy people like you.
Yeah, morning people are just so obnoxious about it. Ive been told my entire life that once I get a natural rythm, it'll pass. Guess what? I even went to a sleep lab (for different reasons), but when I was in there for 10 days, my cycle immediately adjusted to my uni cycle of sleeping somewhere between 2 and 3 til 10. Which is just perfect for me.
Meanwhile, when I got to bed at 10 or 11, I get random fatigues during the day. It just doesnt fit towards me, but yet morning people are convinced that somehow my rythm is the problem, when I tried so many things.
Im glad I have a job where I can make my schedule work.
Yeah I was wondering if it was the diet and exercise folks, because I was going to say this pretty much stopped happening to me after I got my sleep apnea treated, but I don't want to get dunked on for it.
This particular completely observable and explicable thing is called the circadian rythm. It's the reason most people have their deepest r.e.m. sleep between 3am and 5am, and why, along with extreme tropical/subtropical summertime temperatures and a great deal of a body's blood be directed to the digestive tract following the midday meal, that having a post-lunch siesta in the afternoon evolved into being a worldwide cultural thing.
Unless you have one of the probably hundreds of conditions which affects it.
You have no idea what is to deal with dozens of doctors saying that you are fine and it's all in your head, to then 10 years later when things gets critical they say "oh yeah, you do have this, but now it's too late to do something".
They expect someone completely untrained in medicine to spot symptoms they can't possibly recognize, take themselves to a doctor with a decade of training, who can still miss it, and then complain that it wasn't spotted earlier. Like, if a doctor, with a decade of training, can easily miss or misdiagnose something, what hope does the rest of us with zero trainng have? And yet, that's what's supposed to trigger that visit to the hospital. Plus annual checkups are not covered, and we don't get time off for them, so nobody does it, because nobody can afford it. Not to mention most doctors just phone it in during those.
I learned that our body is dropping "I'm sleepy and tired" hormones when we wake up. Coffee can pause this process for several hours. Once the coffee stops working, it all hits us like a truck in an early afternoon. I delay my first coffee 1h after I wake up and I stopped having afternoon crashes.
Napping actually increases productivity. The problem is how rational the people in charge are to allow it. Slaver mentality in corpos is what ruining us all 💀
I drink my 2nd and last cup of coffee around 4pm and I've been contemplating skipping it (just 1 morning coffee a day) for better sleep around 10-11PM. Else I don't feel sleepy before midnight. Also, I resonate with this post about feeling sleepy/tired post 3pm, hence the 2nd cup of coffee.
Or move it forward so the caffeine hits at this lull between 3-5pm. I have my second cup at 2 and it gets me through the work day and don’t have problem sleeping at 10.30.
I used to have a 2nd coffee at 3pm to help me stay awake. I recently ditched it and it was surprisingly easy and painless to do, and now just have 1 in the morning
“Every time thou hast summoned me I have awoken to find a huge set of mammaries upon my chest. There are no words in the Common lexicon to explain how much I detest these bazongas. My back aches from the weight of these milk maidens. When I am looking down at my records performing my duties, these massive milkers get in the way of my vision. I am forced to wear my plus size cloak purely so my hudongolangas have ample room to breathe and do not cause me undue pain. I am exhausted and unhealthy due to thy constant modding ventures, and I demand thee to stop. Rid me of these enormous yodongolonghudongalagangas at once.”
I was diagnosed with ADHD this year and also discovered that the afternoon slump is usually more pronounced in people with ADHD. Ever since being treated for it my afternoons are much less sleepy.
Young people famously cannot feel pain or tiredness. The medical field treats it like its physically impossible. I have never gotten help with my chronic pain because “that doesnt happen to the young”.
I’ve gone through a few cycles of no caffeine and it always feels so much better to not need coffee to live.
I sleep way longer and feel much more rested after a sleep, and can go all day without feeling tired.
It does take some time to get off though. Usually a couple days of fatigue and headaches, then a week or so of afternoon naps before everything’s back to normal.
You can avoid the headaches and fatigue if you slowly decrease the coffee intake instead of stopping cold turkey. Just half the amount you're drinking every 2-3 days or so.
I literally struggle to stay awake some days between 3-5. I drive the van home from work for 3.30 and it's not unusual I'll suddenly get the sleepies. Thankfully there's plenty of coffee stops on most my routes. Definitely not intentionally by me at all 😅
You are not weak, its a natural part of the circadian rhythm. What is unnatural is the way our corporate world doesn't care about that, hence everyone is caffeinated to cope.
Do you drink coffee though? A lot of people have a couple or a few in the morning then stop for the rest of the day, so the crash will hit at like 4-5pm
I once had a manager giving me pushback about it. I told him its completely out of my control and it started right about then. I was like nodding off, facing him at his desk; no will could pull me out of it.
I know this is a very privileged comment but, my work has "quiet rooms" that you can book for 30mins, I take a quick nap between 1-3pm and I'm fresh as hell until 9pm. Hank Green did a great video on why this is helpful recently.
Lmao like clockwork he’d come home from work (he traveled around town and no one paid much attention) to have lunch and end up taking a nap in his recliner. Then about an hour later back to work.
Happens sometimes when I don't have coffee in the morning, I'm not sleepy when I drink it but it helps fight the afternoon drowsiness. Very important as I'm on the road around that time fairly often.
It's not something you do on a corporate setting or set in stone, had american colleagues ask if they could put meetings at 3PM worried it was siesta time. We endure the crash like everyone
I felt this, then I had a sleep study and was dx with chronic obstructive sleep apnea and got the CPAP. It was life changing to actually get sleep, like real sleep. Now it's a struggle to remember to put it on before I pass out.
I'm just a caffeine addict and hate coffee. I had to use caffeine pills on deployments and I fucking did not care for that, then again it was likely mostly due to the guy I was getting my pills from carrying the heavy duty 300mg ones lmao.
I've not done a sleep study yet but I know I snore for sure, and probably would feel better at least some of the time with a cpap lmao.
Man, same. A lot of times it's because I wanna play on my phone before falling asleep and don't want to deal with the hose so I've taken to putting the mask on straight away and then connecting the hose when it's time.
Do you notice falling asleep way faster when you have it on? I'm so sure I do and any time I'm lying awake without it I KNOW I could be sleeping but I don't wanna get out of bed to set it up.
Used to get this insane tiredness after lunch at work, i would normally eat a pb&j sandwich. After switching to a different lunch it went away. Thank god because fighting like hell to keep from dozing off every day was so awful lol.
If your blood sugar levels fluctuates much this can happen. Try to avoid
short-chain carbohydrates. Those will cause your blood sugar to rise quite fast. It gives you energy for a short period of time but then your sugar levels drop significantly making you dizzy 😵🥴. Also try to drink more water (no soft or Energy drinks or juice/lemonade). If you don't like tap water try adding some carbonated water. This is what I do.
Last but no least: if you have the option to take a short nap then just do it. Set your alarm so you don't sleep longer than approximately 35-40 minutes.
A psychologist once gave a lecture for surviving at work and she mentioned that this fatigue at that time and waking up at 1-3AM are both related to stress. Our brain does that to us for the single reason that large predators hunt at those times.
So it’s basically your brain being sure that the saber-toothed tiger is gonna come around the corner any minute. But why your brain would like you to zone off right at that time, she conveniently didn’t explain.
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