There’s no feeling quite as annoying as it. You wake up tired, you crawl out of bed and you spend the day reassuring yourself that you’ll be back in bed before you know it. Your head will be on the pillow, you will be reunited with sleep and this whole groggy day will come to an end.
Then, finally, after a day of fighting sleep and keeping yourself going with the cosy end goal in mind, you get to go to bed. You lie down, snuggle in, and BANG! You’re wide awake.
WHY?!
This is why you stop being tired when you go to bed
This infuriating sensation is called “learned arousal” and it’s probably more common than you think.
According to TIME: “It’s one of the most common sleep problems, and experts think it happens because something in your sleep environment has told your brain that getting in bed should “arouse” you or wake you up, instead of put you to sleep.”
How very typical.
Speaking on this condition, Dr Karan Rajan said: “you’ve accidentally trained your body to associate your bed with being awake.”
He added that if you usually likely do things in bed that stimulate you like watching Netflix, scrolling on your phone, working, or even eating food, you’re teaching your brain that your bed isn’t just for sleeping.
He advises that we should do all of these things in a different part of the home before getting into bed to stop this association being made in our brains.
What to do if you can’t fall asleep
Dr Rajan said if you find yourself struggling to fall asleep after 20 minutes in bed, you should get out of bed and move to a different part of the home until you feel sleepy again.
He added: “you need to break that association between your bed and feeling restless.”
Noted.