Sleep inertia Puns

I mainly struggle with sleep inertia over any other symptom. Does anyone have any good tips for dealing with it? One thing I found that helps is having really bright lights shine in my face in the morning, another tip of course is to take my medication as directed but that isn't ideal and I often feel uncomfortable while taking them. I've also found that getting really drunk the night before helps me wake up the next morning, but that's obviously not something I can do everyday. Please let me know if anyone has any good tips thank you.

I have IH and believe I have for a long time. I live alone and am a very heavy sleeper. I've been called dead sleep, rock sleeper, sleeping beauty, and a past partner would refer to my extra long sleeps as "comas." So, needless to say, I'm kind of hard to wake up!

I have a sonic bomb alarm clock and am about to try a new stimulant similar to Adderall.. can't remember what it's called right now but very similar, and my doctor also wants me to try xywav.

I struggle a lot with grogginess and alertness from sleep inertia. Sometimes I'll turn my alarm off in my sleep and not know it until after I've overslept. Other times I'll wake up, maybe take my stimulant (or not) and fall back to sleep before it's kicked in. And there have even been a few times where I've done things in my sleep and had no idea until later (nothing dangerous).

I have heard that xywav helps with this, but does anyone have any suggestions for how to make this any easier? I set my alarm for an hour before I need to be up and moving so I can take my stimulant and wait for it to kick in. I think, other than the long sleep and general exhausted feeling, this is the hardest part for me about IH.

Thanks

I recently started looking into narcolepsy and I was wondering if a symptom of narcolepsy or some other sleep disorder is basically never experiencing sleep inertia?? My roommates noticed that I literally go from fully asleep to fully awake in a matter of seconds?? I know I have some form of sleep disorder and have a referral for a sleep study but I’m hesitant to try it bc it seems like I’ll have to go off my meds for it? I would love some insight or stories bc I’m exhausted and grasping at straws :(

https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article-abstract/45/1/zsab220/6358036?redirectedFrom=fulltext

24 year old male in United States - Diagnosis’ of: Narcolepsy Type 2, Dysautonomia(POTS), Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome(hEDS), GERD, Major Depression/Anxiety Disorder, Fibromyalgia + I’m sure there’s more…

My main symptom - severe excessive daytime sleepiness is mainly controlled(Nuvigil + Adderall/XR + Caffeine) meaning that I can get through the day without a nap, but that is only when I get at least 11-12+ hours of sleep. If I don’t get that amount of sleep, it’s as if I’ve been hit by a train in the morning and I need to take my meds IMMEDIATELY so they kick in as soon as possible.

I know that people with my diagnosis’ may need 10-12 hours of sleep, especially depending on what medications you’re taking, but it’s pretty frustrating and annoying to say the least… My goal is to be able to sleep and need only 8-9 hours of sleep and feel actually refreshed. The only problem is that I can’t take Xyrem unfortunately due to trying it last year for 6 months and it made me suicidal with debilitating and strange anxiety.

The only other medication that I see as a possibility is JORNAY PM so that it would maybe help with me waking up as it’s almost impossible for me to do so every single day. It’s been a problem for years for me. I would rather not be all “stimmed” out from 3 different stimulants but I don’t know what else there is to give me more “refreshing” sleep or a better quality of sleep. Sometimes I can’t get to sleep even though my meds are completely out of my system when I try to go to sleep too. So would something like Ambien, Remeron, Trazodone, etc. help me at all? Or would it actually hurt me more?

Any help here is very appreciated, thank you for reading!

Summer of 2019 I went to japan with my friends.

Los Angeles to Tokyo – NH 5
Aug 4, 2019, 1:10 PM–Aug 5, 2019, 4:30 PM

Take-off
Aug 4, 2019, 1:10 PM
Landing
Aug 5, 2019, 4:30 PM

For the first few days I was extremely anxious because I was day drinking with my friends and forgot I was on modafinil, which was having interactions with alc, causing anxiety for me. After I stopped taking the modafinil on day 3, I realized I was always the first to wake up every morning. I felt an extreme tiredness by night time and would then sleep for 6-8 hours and would wake up without an alarm clock. This continued even after I returned home, although the effects diminished over time, and then completely disappeared after I stayed up late one night. for some background i've had IH and sleep inertia as long as I can remember, and have only had a few days where I ever woke up easily.

My current theories as to the cause are:

-Jet lag reversing delayed sleep phase syndrome temporarily.

-low inflammation as a response to Japanese food quality.

-something to do with the consistent interaction of modafinil/alcohol for a few days.

any guesses?

Anybody tried cold shower upon waking up? How's your experience? Does it improve your symptom? And if you haven't try it yet, cold shower has a lot of benefit besides improving sleep inertia and brain fog.

No matter how many hours sleep I get the night before (lights and devices turned off) I have a really hard time getting up early in the morning. Not only do I have really low energy, but this persists throughout the day by getting up at this time.

I believe I have Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder, as my body naturally prefers to wake up later in the day and stay active through the night (ie. A “night owl”).

Obviously choosing a job that accommodates this would be a common-sense solution, but since most of society revolves around a 7am-10pmish routine, it would be great to find a way to get my body to adapt to this.

So far, the following approaches have failed:

1. Max dosage of my stimulant medication.
2. Eugeroics (Modafinil, Armodafinil).
3. Glucose tablets.
4. Common stimulants like coffee and nicotine.

Sleep apnea has essentially been ruled out.

I hear that Melatonin can help with this problem, as well as low dose Aripiprazole.

Can anyone think of any others?

First my light up alarm clock brightens the room to max brightness. Cat, dog and spouse are now wide awake. Activity flurries in my home. I pop some IR adderall and roll back over.

30 minutes later the alarm goes off. I tell myself today is the day. I can do it. Also I don’t really need to shower so I can hit snooze. 7 minutes later I think today can still be the day with one more snooze. Today is not the day. Spouse yells at me a few times for my benefit but their frustration will spill over into our marriage sometime soon… it usually does in a totally irrelevant argument.

Wake up in a frenzy. Sun finally starting to make an appearance giving me final boost. Put on clothes. Skip brushing hair. Skip makeup. Forget my lunch (ok let’s be real I stopped trying to bring lunch long ago). I remembered to brush my teeth but I do have the backup in the car. I only buy slip on work shoes because it was getting dangerous tying them while driving. Driving is clearly for brushing hair.

Pull out of driveway… check time. 5 minutes behind schedule. Ok really 20 because “today was the day.” The day I finally clock in early. Ha.

I go 75 in a rural 45 along the river. Paranoid days I check my emergency window breaker is still in the door. I see myself driving into the river in my mind’s eye. I pass the place I got a speeding ticket before. I remind myself I still don’t have points on my license and speeding costs less than unemployment. Make it in only 2 minutes late.

Repeat for 3 years.

I get into work to an awful email. My new boss’s proactive efforts to delay my start time 15 minutes have backfired. HR has flagged me as chronically late and told my boss he can no longer fix my time card. Despite my boss saying it doesn’t matter as long as I get my work done, HR thinks differently. HR doesn’t understand how I can’t just be here 2 minutes sooner. Insert intrusive thought on how if I killed myself at least that bitch in HR would feel guilty.

I hate October.

So I've started running into this weird problem where I will take a nap in the middle of the afternoon and if someone disrupts my nap (like a phone call or someone waking me) then there is about a twenty to thirty minute period where I am extremely groggy, agitated, and basically on the brink of a sensory meltdown the minute I wake up. I can hear my tone with people is much more brusque at this point and I can't make eye contact with them, I can feel my whole body just radiating impatience.

This is always shocking to people who wake me up because I'm usually pretty mellow, but being woken up out of sleep makes me instantly angry. It's like I'm sleepy and angry at the same time - slangry, if you will. It's even worse if I had a beer or two before falling asleep, as I sometimes do since I work out of a taphouse a few times a week.

This state passes in about half an hour, sometimes fifteen minutes, and after that I can think clearly again. I'm pretty sure it's associated with sleep inertia, but the weird thing is I've never been a person who is hard to wake up in the past. I've always just woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. In the mornings I still do. But if I get disrupted during an afternoon nap, I am instantly pissed.

Anybody else have problems transitioning out of sleep?

The title explains itself. Lingering Inertia that takes hours to fade away. Not only that but doesn't merely feel like your motor coordination is slightly off, but that your entire body is drunk and disorientated.

I once spent an hour retrying my password over and over in the morning before realising that I had an incorrect spelling in my head almost like a milder, more brief version of neural deficits like anomia. Also (despite being very frail) your strength is gone, the flesh and muscle in your limbs are numb but there is pain from the nerves aching.

I have to lie at the opposite end of the bed so that

1. I can retain comfortability as my body is still used to lying down and trying to force myself to get up will probably be incredibly miserable, painful, nauseating and perhaps dangerous.
2. I can have time to wake up as I have moved around slightly more, giving my brain more time to awaken its motor processing.

--Be me

--Be someone who has IH

--Have extreme difficulty waking up in the morning, and am always tired during the day

--Wake up every morning resembling an extra on The Walking Dead

--#ripvanwinkle

--Doc prescribes armonfadil to help keep me awake during the day

--Armonfadil works great to keep me awake, but I have to wake up first before I can take it

--#sleepinertiaproblems

--Follow up with doc, explain difficulty waking up

--Tells me there's medication designed to help with that, usually prescribed to narcolepsy patients

--Excitement.exe

--Ask doc if I can try this medication

--Doc says he legally can't, since the FDA hasn't approved it for use in IH patients, even though he says that's exactly what I need

--CrushingDisappointment.exe

--Ask if there is a medication like that for IH patients

--Am told there isn't

--Resign myself to hiding alarm clocks, set to go off at six in the morning, throughout the house

--Have to force myself to get out of bed somehow

--Probably going to really annoy my wife

--She's probably going to either leave me or kill me

--Lock up the guns and have a divorce attorney on standby, just in case

--#problemsolved

The struggle is real, folks.

Anyone else with extreme sleep inertia issues have any tips for waking up when you want to?

I have narcolepsy with cataplexy. A couple years ago after taking naps I began to experience extended episodes of what seem to be sleep inertia. I would wake up confused, disoriented, slurred speech, strange emotions. This lasts for about 30+ minutes. I've noticed that if I take even a small dose of kratom 1.5g, within several minutes my mental state is stabilized. Does anyone have any ideas as to why kratom may be having this positive impact?

Has anyone had success dealing with SSRI/SNRI-induced hypersomnia and sleep drunkedness? I set 5 alarm clocks all around the house and hunt them down to turn them off. So that gets me up when I have to go to school/work. But I'm still battling falling asleep at work. I work out before work and sometimes fall asleep during the workout. I have fallen asleep after running 5 miles while stretching on a hot sidewalk. I'm on the SNRI, venlafaxine 37.5 mg; have been for 6 weeks now. I've tried other SNRIs and 5 other SSRI's and they did the same thing. I take the lowest dose possible and I take it at night. I take cold showers. I get 10+ sleep during weeknights and 15+ hours on weekends. I'm wondering if anyone has had success with dealing with the sleeping excessively? Wondering if there any other hacks out there that folks have tried that works for them?

My medication is going to have be adjusted when I go to my doctor appointment in July. Adderall isn't keeping me from falli asleep anymore, and sleep inertia in the mo is getting worst. Even with taking my first dose of Adderall about an hour before my alarm.

I've talked to my therapist, I've talked to my psychiatrist, and now I'm pulling out the big guns... I'm asking you all for help. I don't know if I have DSPD/N24 and I don't think it really matters for this discussion since I know some (most/all?) of you all struggle with sleep inertia too.

Basically, my sleep has become so dysregulated (hypersomnia) that I have developed severe sleep inertia. I mean the alarm goes off and I can't think clearly enough to care that I have to be somewhere in an hour, and sometimes I even turn alarms off without remembering it. I've tried a handful of sleep meds, mood stabilizers, and antidepressants. I've tried setting multiple alarms with different sounds at max volume. I've tried using a real alarm clock and putting it across the room. I have a prescription stimulant, but I'm so groggy and dizzy (POTS) when I'm walking across the room to turn the alarm clock off that I can't convince myself that I would be awake if I would just take it and it's not that difficult of a task.

If you have any tips or tricks for waking up through a dense mental fog in the morning, I am all ears. I am a step away from having to take a leave of absence from school I've fallen so behind from not getting up in the morning. I am desperate. I am thankful for ANY advice.

TL;DR: Best tips for getting yourself out of bed in the morning even when it feels impossible?

I know that xywav is currently in trials for IH. Are there any other meds out there that work for sleep drunkenness/inertia? Slept through all five of my alarms today. I’m on modafinil now which sort of helps with EDS (but still super sleepy most of the day), but I’m still really struggling getting up in the morning.

It takes me about 30-90 minutes to wake up from a natural wake up. I am severely scared and disoriented being woken up. How long does your sleep inertia last and do you have any tips for speeding up the process? My inertia is severe dizziness, pressure in my head, desire to close my eyes and sleep, buzzing in my body, difficulty with muscle motor (moving my muscles by will). I am basically cognitively impaired until my body is fully awake. I am medicated so I don’t have the same muscle pains waking as I did pre-meds.

Hello! I've been having trouble maintaining a consistent sleep schedule for a few years now, and I thought I might ask for some advice here. My interoception is really bad, so I usually can't tell whether or not I'm tired or sleepy until my eyes start burning and watering or I've fallen asleep where I'm sitting.

I try to keep track of time, but for some reason I always end up going to bed an hour later than I did the night before. Autistic inertia makes it difficult to stop what I'm doing, and even relaxing things like reading or listening to music end up capturing all of my attention to the point that I can't just put the activity down and go to bed. It's like the physical effects of tiredness aren't strong enough as an incentive, so I just stay up anyways. Quarantine hasn't helped, and sometimes I sleep between 9 am and 5 pm. It's gotten to the stage where I can only fix my messed up sleep schedule by staying up for 24 hours and "resetting" it, but it isn't a consistent solution and doing it too often is probably detrimental to my health.

Do you have any advice for fixing this? Thank you in advance!

Hello everyone! I am 9 days into being a new mum now and I just want to ask, is there a secret to sleeping when the baby sleeps and not feeling completely crappy when you wake up? I try and squeeze in an hour here and there when I can but I end up waking feeling worse than when I went to sleep (think- shakey, headaches, irritable, brain all fogged up) it just sucks! I do get a good four-hour sleep when my partner takes over in the evening and I wake up feeling quite good after that! I am just aware that I can not survive on 4 hours a day so naps are really necessary to keep me sane and well.

TLDR; Does anyone else experience EXTREME difficulties waking up no matter how much sleep they’ve gotten? Is this a symptom of ADHD? If yes, advice please.

Hello all! I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 12 (I am now 28) I went on and off medication...now I have been on Vyvanse for many years. Because of my early diagnoses many subsequent doctors did not go over a lot of the symptoms with me because they assumed I already understood them...long story short - new doctor, Instagram, and Reddit...I am learning so many of my behaviors I thought were character flaws are actually ADHD symptoms.

I have an incredibly difficult time waking up and staying awake in the morning. I am trying to figure out if this is a symptom of ADHD other people experience or perhaps something else is going on.

This happens no matter how much sleep I get. If I am lucky enough to be woken up by my alarm my sleepy brain convinces me that I can get more sleep, I can call out of work, or I don’t need to go to that appointment. I have lost jobs, been unable to finish college, had to switch doctors because of the shame....all because I can’t wake up.

If anyone else experiences this please let me know, and of course advice on how to deal with it if you’ve got any!

(I am currently writing this after just calling out for the second day in a row. This current job is causing the most problems because I can use our company app to call out and don’t have to actually speak to anyone.)

My therapist told me that since I’m 21, my prefrontal cortex is still developing, which inhibits decision making skills, and that when I’m waking up this issue can be exacerbated.

My issue in particular is that when my alarm goes off, I will act purely on instinct. I feel like an addict trying to get his fix when it comes to getting more sleep in the mornings, it’s all I can think about in the moment, even if my alarm is in another room. Then I’ll wake up at 3PM and miss everything I had planned.

The problem has become so severe that I’ve had to sell precious belongings to pay my rent from missed work. It’s so difficult to explain that it’s more than just laziness, it’s rather that I can’t think properly and make executive decisions in the morning. I’ve pulled all nighters and had more success working simply from the lack of sleep inertia clouding my brain, but that solution isn’t sustainable.

Please help.

My holidays have basically been ruined. For the past month, I have been having occassional bouts of sleep inertia that last maybe 2 hours or so. This past week, I have experienced it 4 out of 7 days, though, and those two hours are now actually 6-10 hours of me not being to use motor functions properly, walking is...off limits basically, I have loss of depth perception, no sense of time, and it feels like someone is stretching cotton balls across my brain when I try and think clearly. I also have no appetite and the thought of eating absolutely repulses me. It happened on Christmas and I couldn't bring myself to zoom call any of my family because any of the communication input probably would have caused a meltdown (oh, did I mention I'm also hella moody, irritable and experiencing incredibly intense emotions leadings to meltdowns?). It also happened this morning, New Year's, and I am honestly still kinda working through it. (Writing this has been my hardest task today so far. So many mispells and typos). The thing is, I don't exactly think this is just caused by what Google is telling me sleep inertia is caused by as I get plenty of sleep and have a regular schedule. Does anyone else experience it this bad? Am I just not normal in this? Google tells me it should be 20 mins to 2 hrs at most, yet half my day is affected.

You know that grogginess you feel when you wake up after napping for an hour? Gone. You can nap for how ever long you want and always wake up feeling fine.

Hello. So lately I've been experiencing a lot of grogginess after wake up that lasts all morning. It seems like I can't fully wake up. I feel dizzy, unable to concentrate, feels like I can't focus on anything and it's affecting my life. Is is a sleeping problem? Cuz I don't know what to do

I am borderline nonfunctional in the mornings. Incredibly slow thinking, low mood, impossible to motivate myself.

I'm weaning off my medication in line with medical advice so hopefully that will help with a variety of the issues I have. I do feel more amped up when I don't have a dose but it's more of a nervous energy than a good 'drive'.

I've found having a shower can help. Another one is just eating until I am absolutely stuffed with food but that is not a healthy habit. Caffeine can help but again it's a nervous/anxious jitteriness.

I am getting enough good sleep. I have tried lots of apps and heart rate monitors so I do not think it's sleep apnea, and my doctor did confirm that unless I am falling asleep during the day it isn't necessarily what's wrong with a me.

I don't feel bad at all in the evenings and I hit a reasonably good stride around 6pm, but that's just impractical and unsustainable for me when I have stuff to do.

Any ideas?

I’ve been feeling quite strange upon waking recently and after some googling I discovered the term “sleep inertia” aka sleep drunkenness. I was quite sure that is what was happening to me. But this morning I had another episode of sleep paralysis (I’ve had it on and off for a few years) and now I’m wondering if my “sleep inertia” is just the lingering effects of sleep paralysis? It doesn’t seem to be super obviously sleep paralysis, because it’s like I wake up, can’t move for 2-3 seconds, then when I can move and get up my body is extremely fatigued and heavy for the next 5-15 minutes, if I can even manage to stay awake because I often just fall right back to sleep. With sleep paralysis I sometimes feel like I “snap” out of it and can suddenly move just fine after it passes. I was also under the impression that sleep paralysis always meant hallucinations but now I read that isn’t necessarily true.

What do you think? Has anyone else experienced sleep inertia type symptoms? Is there a connection between these two? Or is it all just sleep paralysis?

I wanna start a thread about sleep inertia. Is this a common narcolepsy issue? I have sleep inertia so bad that it sometimes lasts all day. If I take my stims while I have sleep inertia, they don’t work at all. Nothing combats it. Literally, if I won the lottery while sleep drunk I would still be like “oh uhh what the lottery is how much do?” Some people say they can shock themselves out of it, and that sometimes works for about 3 mins before I go back to feeling like I chugged a bottle of NyQuil. I have to limit myself to 6 hours of sleep a night because when I do that, the sleep inertia usually only lasts an hour or two instead of 4-8 hours. My sleep doc told me to take scheduled naps, but even a 20 minute nap will f*ck up my whole day and impair me for hours.

So like.. what’s the deal with this?? What causes it and why have I read so much literature saying that people with narcolepsy wake up refreshed but I .. don’t? Any research I should read on this topic? Also, I currently only take stimulants because I’m terrified that xyrem (being a sedative) will make the sleep drunkenness worse. Am I totally wrong, does xyrem actually help with this?

So I struggle with sleep inertia, baaaaad. And I have tried basically everything. Vibrating alarms, sunrise alarms, changing the alarm tone every week. The problem is even if the method works at first I always manage to get used to it and can just sleep through. My sleep doc suggested talking my first Adderall dose and going back to sleep. I was able to groggily take it for about a week and the wake up a little later once it has kicked in. Then I started sleeping through that alarm or if I did manage to roll over and take it, I'd sleep straight through to my second dose.

I was once again fervently researching for a new alarm or wake up option to get my ass out of bed in the morning. The same old suspects kept coming up. Vibrating, super loud, sunrise...

Then I came across the pavlok shock clock. It's definitely not for everyone. It incorporates vibrating, beeps, and the magic ingredient: a shock! It's not a cheap option, but on par with a nice sunrise clock. It gives you loads of options to customize it to your needs. I have it set to buzz, beep, and then shock three times each at thirty seconds intervals. Snooze is locked, and I have to do 15 jumping jacks to turn it off. (Really difficult to fake, I tested this and the only way I could "fake" it was by essentially doing a half jumping jack that was arguably harder than just doing the damn jumping jacks.) It allows you to set the zap intensity, and number of zaps at a time. So I'm confident that if I do start to get used to it, I'll still have room to adjust.

Y'all I've got an actual sleep schedule. For the past ten days since I've received it I have been awake and out of bed at 7am. I've been working out, making breakfast. Getting out of bed before my "early riser" husband on the weekends. This is fucking great. And the biggest difference with this is my perception. The zap gets your adrenaline going and everything happens fast. So the key is that I don't perceive to be fighting through the inertia. It's easy and just feels natural.

If you are at your wits end with fighting sleep inertia (or as I affectionately call mine: irrational sleepy brain), I have personally had a great experience with this.

DISCLAIMER: NOT A DOCTOR, please please please make sure you check in with your doctor to make sure an electrical shock is safe for you. I had just finished a battery of eeg, ekg, etc. And have a clean bill of heart and Neuro health. So I'm very comfortable with using this.

If I'm woken up during my deep sleep cycle or if I go back to sleep after waking up in the early morning, I get a persistent sleep inertia where I'm stuck in bed all dizzy and unable to get up and it could last until 12pm-5pm. Is this CFS related? Does anyone else get this?

Another term for this feeling might be hypersomnia/sleep drunkenness

It completely ruined my day today and it feels awful

My evening routine starts when timers switch on my Himalayan Salt Lamps at 2200. The glow is very soothing, and for the rest of my routine, exposure to bright white light is limited to the 10-15 minutes I spend in the bathroom.

I'm not able to stop full use of my phone as I use it for my guided meditations, but it automatically dims to the lowest brightness and switches to greyscale, so I don't think it's a factor.

My bedroom is a good temperature, very quiet and while I haven't got blackout curtains, I use a sleep mask. I am so grateful that my mattress is so unnaturally comfortable, but it's not too soft. It's maybe medium-firm.

I stop eating 6 hours before bed (intermittent fasting), I do low to moderate exercise every day and I rarely drink caffeine, but when I do, it's never past 1300. I also don't drink alcohol and I eat a very balanced diet.

I also have a solid method for falling asleep in less than 20 minutes. I used to struggle really badly with that, so I did a considerate amount of research and put together a method that takes less than 10 minutes to complete. Let me know if you want me to share.

Anyway, it doesn't matter how quickly I fall asleep, or how well I sleep, I feel absolutely atrocious in the mornings. I've tried using a spray bottle with water on my face, downing a glass of water and listening to beta wave, which all help a lot. The problem is, most of the time, the inertia is so strong I can't even feel the motivation to reach for the bottle or my phone, even though I know that they work so effectively.

My limbs feel pinned down, but I'm also extremely comfortable, which I think may be a big factor, but I wouldn't want to get a less comfortable mattress. Some mornings, my bedroom can be very stuffy, which causes this tightening sensation in my chest; unpleasant enough to get me out of bed just to open the window. Not all the time, so sometimes I'm stuck in bed, feeling like I can't breathe, but I'm totally unable to stand up to open the window. It's a really terrible way to start my day.

Is there something I'm doing wrong that's contributing to my inertia? Is there something I can do before sleep to prevent experiencing inertia? Thanks for your help!

TL;DR - Excellent sleep hygiene + I fall asleep quickly and easily + I get great quality sleep, however severe sleep inertia prevents me from opening my windows to breathe in the morning!

Lack of activity, sun light, and abnormal hours so that's an obvious.

In the meantime how can this state be improved upon ....coffee ?

I've never been so cognitively desolate

Ok, this might be a little bit long. Also, if you have any tips for fighting sleep inertia, lay them on me because I have sleep inertia from hell.

I’m supposed to be at work every morning at 8:00am. There were two days this week I got there at 8:01am. This has happened before, because me waking up in the morning is like trying to juggle flaming chainsaws, blindfolded, on a tightrope, underwater. It might happen, but probably isn’t going to. I don’t currently have any accommodations, but I’m going to bring it up with my sleep doc next appointment. My supervisor can’t live in a world of chaos where his employees are 60 seconds late so we were talking about why I was at work one minute later than I was supposed to be.

First of all, I was embarrassed because 1) I was late and I hate being late AND IT WAS LITERALLY ONE MINUTE LIKE WHAT THE HELL LIKE I LITERALLY JUST NEED TO LEAVE MY HOUSE 65 SECONDS EARLIER, and because 2) I, a grown-ass adult, had to explain to my boss that I sleep through the seven morning alarms I have set and then when I do finally wake up, I have sleep inertia from hell so it takes me forever to physically wake up, then another forever to mentally wake up, and I’m still not fully conscious for another hot minute, so I’m always running late to everything. I’ve tried to explain this before, but no one seems to understand exactly how much of a battle waking up is. While talking with my boss this morning, I was explaining that part of my brain hears the alarm and tells the rest of my brain to wake up. The rest of my brain doesn’t understand what waking up means and so I have to fight really hard to physically wake up. Once I physically wake up, I have to fight sleep inertia so it’s like my brain is now awake and is telling my body to wake up, but my body doesn’t understand what waking up means either. It’s a whole ordeal.

My supervisor was looking at me with the expression that people get when they don’t really believe how bad/hard it is, but they don’t want to say anything. He asked if I could just set my alarm two or three minutes earlier. I told him I would try waking up ten minutes earlier (because, you know, waking up earlier magically makes the sleep inertia go away), then said,

“Me trying to wake up is like walking into a room and flicking the light switch, but it takes the lights fifteen minutes to come on”.

I think he finally kind of understood what I was saying, which was nice. I’m still so embarrassed that I came in one m

Sleep inertia is the prolonged feeling of grogginess or disorientation that can occur immediately after waking. It can occur in healthy brains as well as those with narcolepsy.

It often but not always indicates having woken up directly from a deeper stage of sleep.

In people with narcolepsy, sleep inertia is often pronounced and can last hours. I have experienced this myself, and at a certain point it does become almost second nature and I forget that it is not normal to wake up that way.

On reflection I think that my rare "good days" are those days I wake with little or no sleep inertia. To be fair, it almost never happens. lol

In my own case, even stimulants don't completely break the sleep inertia.

I'm sharing this article here because I've seen several people mention this phenomenon without using the name, so I just want to share information:

https://www.healthline.com/health/sleep/how-to-deal-with-sleep-inertia

Nota bene that the article says that sleep inertia dissipates within 30 to 60 minutes. This is the reference point for healthy people, I'm sure many of us have experienced sleep inertia that lasts basically all day.

Goodnight. ;)