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Study: Waking Up Like Being Drunk
Ant writes "CNN reports that "sleep inertia" leaves some people so groggy, after they wake up, they might as well be drunk, researchers said on Tuesday. "For a short period, at least, the effects of sleep inertia may be as bad as or worse than being legally drunk," said researcher Kenneth Wright of the University of Colorado at Boulder."
So am I going to get a DUI for sleeping through the alarm and rushing to work while groggy? Can't wait for that.
At least it won't show up on a breathilizer.
Just one of the reasons why I choose to shower in the morning rather than in the evening.
I wrote a paper about biological rythms, night work and the use of bright light to ease the transitions from day to night work and back. During that work I read about "alarm" clocks called simulated dawn, it's like a brigth light like the ones used to treat seasonal affective disorders, but it's connected to a clock. You can adjust when the light should light up, and then it will gradually increase the light. This light will be sensed through the eyelids, and when you reach the next light sleep phase you will wake up feeling refreshed (in theory, at last). No need to do complicated, uncomfortable measurements of REM or whatever.
I would love to have one of these but my girlfriend gets up later than me and she also wakes more easily, so she is less than thrilled about the idea.
No idea on pricing.
I literally think more slowly after waking up. When I shower in the morning it takes me like 20 minutes to do the exact same procedure I can complete in 10 minutes if take a shower in the middle of the day.
;)
I bicycle to work, and I've found the exercise really helps to jolt you awake. Fresh air and exercise in general wakes me up much better than getting on a bus to work does. Below freezing temperatures help too
I think people tend to take their need of sleep too lightly these days. I would prefer to sleep about 9 hours a night, but practical issues and social pressure keeps me at between 6 and 8 hours per night. I don't feel that time spent sleeping is wasted, as a programmer I often that I've solved problems during sleep.
.: Max Romantschuk
Where all this scares me is with respect to medical care. My understanding is that while there are guidelines on how many hours, eg, medical residents can work, at least in many cases it is cheaper for hospitals to pay the fine than to hire more residents. I have heard of studies comparing sleep deprivation to being drunk for a long time. Hopefully they are starting to add up, and we'll stop having to wonder whether the doctor looking at us in the emergency room hasn't slept in the last 24 hours.
This problem of getting to full cognitive capacity after waking is a serious one in some professions. Think about doctors who are on night duty and are woken up to immediately deal with an emergency. In some cases it might be better to just stand around and do nothing for a few minutes unless it really is life threatening.
I had a doctor friend who, after coming in from a night out drinking, used to hook himself up to a drip. End result: waking up with no dehydration and much less of a hangover, but that's slightly OT.
I also heard that in the British Army, the first minute after waking up doesn't officially exist - that's because they're aware that people are still "out of sorts" and incapable for at least a minute. In theory, you can punch the Sgt-Major and get away with it.
Of course, he would make you pay one way or another...
bang goes my karma... again...
I have the same problem and think I know the solution. What we need is a loud alarm-clock with no or very limited snooze that cannot be turned off (its alarm would stop after say 5 minutes). The time and alarm settings could only be altered in a fixed window (say between midday and midnight), and the thing would be indestructible. What do you think?
When I first wake up in the morning, I feel like someone has taken a baseball bat and nailed me in the back of the head with it. This is related to some serious headache issues I have, but it leads me to something else.
My cognitive abilities upon waking are nearly non-existent: I've been known to slur words and been unable to string together a coherent sentence.
My physical abilities aren't much better: I've fallen down the stairs, walked into doors, and walked into walls.
What's scary is that for years I've been on call for various employers (ISPs mostly). When that pager goes off and I have to wake up and troubleshoot a problem, just getting to my office downstairs can be dangerous. Then trying to "rev up" my brain to work on the problem can take a long time. You should talk to some of my coworkers who've called me in the middle of the night for help with a problem - I'm sure that the conversation sounded like one with a person who has been drinking heavily.
I have no difficulty at all in believing that waking up makes some people so groggy that their abilities are no better than those of someone who is drunk. And when that person needs to make decisions with serious consequences, that is not a good thing.
I find it hard to believe that supervisors who couldn't grasp the concept when someone with common sense told them would believe (or even understand) a "scientific" study stating the very same thing.
I'd speculate that the issue is not about people not knowing/not believing that the situation in hospitals causes problems, rather that they just don't know how to fix it within budget and practical constraints (like, can't shut down the hospital at night time).
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
Not always. In some states in the US (like mine for example, and I sat on a jury for a DUI case), the percentage is not relevant. The jury is instructed to decide if, in their judgement, the person was "impaired" due to the consumption of alcohol, based on their own experience and witness testimony (arresting officer talking about a sobriety test and/or observed behavior, generally.) Matter of fact, we asked the judge for information regarding the legal definition as related to BAC, and we were told "never you mind, facts not in evidence."
BTW, shotgunning 2 beers inside 15 minutes after driving for 6 hours = impaired. Guilty.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I think this article (the news version, at least--I haven't read the actual paper yet, so I can't comment on it) makes one gross error of omission: there is very little discussion of where in the sleep cycles the subjects were woken up. The only thing I've seen that even remotely relates is the 8-hour sleep period used, and that disturbs me for reasons I'll go into later.
/Why We Nap/ that describes performance on cognitive tests (e.g., a mathematical reasoning test) after being woken up from each of the five stages of sleep. They tested subjects who had been deprived of sleep for some period of time (I think about 24 hours or less), and then let the subjects sleep for between something like 15 minutes and 80 minutes, depending on their random group assignment and how long they took to enter each stage. On average, the cohort woken up in the middle of stage one, two, and five sleep performed the best, with cognitive deficits disappearing after about 40 minutes, followed by performance that for up to four hours significantly exceeded their pre-nap (and sleep-deprived) performance. Of those three groups, those woken during REM sleep performed the best, and those "woken" during stage one sleep (i.e., drowsy wakefulness) performed the worse, taking about 10 more minutes before shaking off the weight of slumber. On the other hand, those woken during SWS had much greater deficits that lasted several hours, followed by a (shorter) period of above-baseline performance that lasted until about four hours after being woken.
So the human sleep cycle is about 90 minutes in length, and is composed of up to five stages. Stage one sleep is just a euphemism for barely-awake drowsiness. Stage two sleep is the first stage of what we typically call "sleep". It's a rather light sleep, usually dreamless or with vague, poorly-defined hallucination-like dreams. The EEG of stage two sleep is characterized by dominant theta wave (4-8 Hz) activity with small amounts of alpha (8-12 Hz) and delta (0.5-4 Hz). Stages three and four are commonly called "deep sleep" or "slow wave sleep" (SWS), and are defined according to the amount of delta waves present. By definition, stage three consists of 20-50% delta wave activity and stage four consists of more than 50% delta wave activity. These stages are completely dreamless, as the brain is nearly completely inactive during these times. Stage five sleep is also known as REM sleep. During the other four sleep stages, the eyes have little or no movement (as measured by electrooculogram, or EOG), and muscle tone is moderate (as measured by electromyogram, or EMG). During REM sleep, this pattern reverses: the eyes move rapidly, as if the subject were awake and alert, whereas muscular activity and tone flatlines. REM sleep is where the majority of dreams occur, and all of the more vivid ones. EEG and brain activity is similar to stage two sleep. I don't know for sure, but something makes me want to say that while theta waves are the dominant waveform in REM sleep, a fair amount of beta (> 12 Hz) and alpha present as well, moreso than stage 2 sleep.
There's a paper or two in Claudio Stampi's
If the subjects in this study performed that poorly for several hours after being woken, they were probably woken during SWS. Given that they were given 8 hours to sleep, they probably were woken during SWS.
An average (uninterrupted) sleep cycle typically consists of about 25-40 minutes of stage one and two sleep at the beginning, 10-40 minutes of SWS in the middle, and 0-35 minutes of REM at the end. The amount of each stage of sleep depends on a number of factors, such as the time of day, the time since the last sleep, the amount of "sleep debt" (which is really SWS debt), how physically active the person has been (physical exhaustion produces more and deeper SWS), how mentally active the person has been (the more things a person has learned in the last 1-4 days, the more REM sleep the person will typically get--especially if the new knowledge is procedur