Waking up tired is the worst feeling. You go to sleep at night after a long day in the hope that you will wake, rested and energised, only to wake up feeling like you’ve done another day’s work. Maybe your tolerance levels are becoming lower and lower, with the fuse on your temper getting shorter and shorter. But if nothing else you just feel exhausted all the time! Why is this happening?

It is so common for people to feel exhausted due to poor sleep that it has it’s own abbreviation. According to the NHA it is called TATT – Tired all the time. If you are tired all the time, you should speak to a medical professional to investigate the reasons. If the tiredness is not accompanied by other symptoms and no reason can be found, it may be that what is happening during the day is to blame for your poor sleep at night.

But I am sleeping!

Many people suffer from insomnia, and there are lots of different types. You may find it difficult to fall asleep at night. You may fall asleep easily but then wake in the middle of the night and find yourself unable to get back to sleep again for hours, possibly at all. But it may be that you are sleeping easily all night long, it’s just that you wake up and feel as if you haven’t slept at all! According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, in an article on tiredness, “At any given time, 1 in every 5 people feel unusually tired and 1 in 10 have prolonged fatigue. Women tend to feel tired more than men . It can be a problem at any age, but is less common in the very young and old”.

So what is going on? Surely if we are asleep all night we shouldn’t still feel tired?

The wrong kind of sleep

Not all sleep is equal. What we need to feel refreshed and to keep healthy, is slow wave recuperative sleep. But we also need to spend a portion of that time dreaming. This deals with emotional thoughts that we have had during the day. This is mostly done in REM sleep. In an ideal world, the proportion of dream sleep would be around 25% of our total sleep. Dreaming takes a lot of our energy; in fact it takes up more energy than being awake! So as the proportion of REM sleep rises then we get less of the sleep we need to feel physically refreshed.

Why am I dreaming so much?

We need dream sleep to remain mentally healthy and we have to have the recuperative sleep to remain physically healthy. But we must have the right balance between the two. So if we are spending too much of our day looking inwards, having negative thoughts and worrying, then the amount of dream sleep will become too much for us to process without harming us. If we wake up tired, we are likely to get more emotional or irritable, and this will create more negative thoughts that need to be dealt with… This can lead to depression and anxiety.

Breaking the cycle

If we can do things that limit the negative thoughts we have during the day, such as, exercise, meditation or mindfulness, then this can have a huge impact on the quality of our sleep. Meaning that when we wake up we are more refreshed, and it is easier to spend that day not thinking negatively.

For more information visit our website or get in touch now for a free 15 minute telephone consultation on how we can help you tackle your sleeping patterns, and any related issues.