How to wake up easier

How to wake up easier… that’s the dream! Some mornings getting up is much more difficult than others. Disoriented, not fully awake, you have the feeling of being slowed down. This feeling can even have a tendency to last during the day. Well, guess what, it’s not just an impression. If a sadistic researcher decided to test your calculation speed or memory capacity just after you wake up, your score would be much worse than at any other time of the day. This is what specialists call “sleep inertia”. The good news is that Dreem’s Smart Alarm can help with that. 

How to wake up easier- 1. Understanding sleep inertia 

If the feeling of drowsiness dissipates quickly, the impact on our performance takes more time to disappear. Depending on the tasks performed, we need up to 2 or 4 hours to find our speed and pre-sleep performance level! And this happens even when you feel like you’ve woken up in top form. Even if this inertia exists systematically, its severity is very variable. According to researchers in the field, it is influenced by three main factors: the sleep stage you wake up in, the duration of sleep that preceded the awakening, and the existence of a sleep deficit.

Most studies of sleep inertia looked at its post-nap severity. The effects of this inertia are indeed particularly crucial for employees working nights with some naps during their shifts. However, their conclusions can be applied to a normal night’s sleep.

These results indicate that, in order to reduce one’s subjective (the feeling of fatigue) and objective sleep inertia (the drop in performance), one must maximize the chances of waking up at the right moment: during the light sleep phase.
Deep sleep happens mostly at the beginning of the night and REM sleep at the end. Good news! The probability of waking up in stage N3 is therefore low. Yes. For a young person without sleep issues. But sleep deprivation, or its fragmentation because of insomnia or apnea-type sleep disorder, will profoundly modify this architecture. The amount of deep sleep at the end of the night increases. With it, it also increases the risk of waking up with severe inertia.