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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."
I didn't get smashed last night, I just wake up drunk, honest!
Czech language for absolute beginners
So remember folks: If you fall asleep while driving it's very important that you don't attempt to wake up.
... waking up should be forbidden for persons younger than 21 years ;o)
...and dreamt of being at a Black Sabbath concert. They were grinding out "Iron Man", and I was in front, doing some mighty head-banging.
Things turned literal when my head met the window sill against which my bed lay.
I became semi-conscious, with blood streaming from my forhead, but couldn't move well because my right arm was still asleep.
Almost deathly so: my sleeping position had cut off circulation to the arm, apparently for a long time. The Sabbath dream had been my subconscious trying to 'rock' me into a different position. Later, when my arm functioned again and the bleeding stopped I thought, wow, that would have been pretty funny, if it hadn't happened to me...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The sleeptracker watch is what your talking about, it monitors your body signals to wake you up at the best moment, you set an alarm window & it will wake you up at the best time, they sell on Amazon for 139.95.
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
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...
Perhaps you should find some other place to conduct that procedure. Most slashdotters do it in front of their PC at night, I think.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
If you had gone to a hospital bureaucrat and argued against shift patterns for junior doctors requiring them to nap during the night when no patients were around, and they asked you for evidence, what then do you do? Say that they would be sleepy? That it was common sense that they couldn't do their job safely?
I suspect you'd be dismissed because people don't make important decisions like that based on what Joe Schmoe reckons is 'obvious'. That's why things that, on the face of them seem obvious, must be checked out scientifically. There has to be evidence to base decisions on, as gut feelings and common sense are, in many cases, completely and flagrantly wrong.
You demand those new conditions for junior doctors, and you're suddenly paying them millions of pounds more countrywide. I wouldn't stake millions of pounds on someones common sense without something more to back it up.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
Obligatory quote: "I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day." - Frank Sinatra
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