In an August 28 podcast clip shared by Dr Mark Hyman on Instagram, Dr Andy Galpin, PhD, an elite performance coach and scientist, explained why people who sleep 8 hours every day still feel tired when they wake up. Think you’re doing everything right for your sleep, but still feel exhausted? The reason might be just as simple as sleep regularity .
In the clip, Dr Hyman asked Andy to explain the problems most people have with sleep and their causes. He explained, “They’ll say, hey, I got my eight and a half hours or seven and a half [of sleep]. But we had social jet lag. Social jet lag is the idea that you basically give yourself jet lag on the weekends. Andy explains that one can give themselves sleep jet lag by changing the time they usually sleep on weekends. But this is where your body suffers from sleep irregularity. “It might not be about how much sleep you’re getting. It’s about when you’re getting it. But sleep regularity has a much bigger impact on how you feel than the number of hours alone. And the older you get, the harder it is to bounce back.
Here’s how: “Let’s say you go to bed at 10 on the weekdays, wake up at 6, there’s your eight hours. But then on the weekends, you stay up until 2 am and sleep until 10. Even if you get 8 hours a night, shifting your sleep schedule on the weekends (what researchers call social jet lag) can leave you feeling wired, foggy, and under-recovered,” he added.
Because you sleep less, but because you sleep in a two or three-hour different time domain, not. Because you’re now four hours off, you still got your eight, but you’ve given yourself jet lag. Because we are out socialising or just trying to relax our minds on the weekend, many of us do that.
The biggest problem people face with sleep is that they don’t pay attention to the outside of total sleep: sleep regularity – going to bed and waking up at the same time each day, according to him. Most people focus on sleep quantity, according to Andy.
He explained that 20-year-olds, and even early 30-year-olds, can get away with sleep jet lag. However, for people who are past that age, it becomes really debilitating, even if they sleep eight and a half hours every day. They will still feel exhausted if there is no regularity.
