I Slept 8 Hours … Explain Yourself, Body

I slept 8 hours, oh degenerate body of mine, explain yourself.

Genuinely. A full 8 hours. Eyes closed at a reasonable time, woke up without my alarm, didn’t doom scroll for an hour before sleep, didn’t even wake up to pee. But still woke up looking and feeling (gratefully not smelling) like I spent half the night in a dumpster.

So here’s what I’m talking about today - why you can do everything “right” on paper and still feel like you got hit by a truck. The answer isn’t automatically more caffeine or “you’re just dysregulated” even though those are 2 answers the internet loves nowadays.

Confession - I abuse the FUCK out of caffeine. And definitely lean into the dysregulation rationale for feeling like shit. But that’s not everything.

So let’s start with the obvious - yes, sleep duration matters, but it isn’t the whole story. Other factors: sleep quality, how many times you woke up, what time you last had caffeine, if you drank alcohol (that’s a big one I’ll talk about in more detail in a later post), and sometimes actual medical issues.

I want to be direct about that last one, because it gets skipped over a lot in the wellness space. If you’re chronically and unexplainably exhausted, that’s worth an actual medical conversation, not just a nervous system reframe. I’ll always tell you that because I still practice in the hospital and I’ve seen what gets missed when everyone assumes it’s “just stress”.

So, assuming there’s not something medical going on, let’s talk about the weird pattern a lot of us live inside - the 2pm to midnight flip:

2:13 PM: I would sell a kidney for a 20 minute nap. I cannot form complete sentences. Someone asks me a simple question and I stare at them like I’m a possum trying to do calculus.

11:47 PM: You know what we haven’t fully unpacked? That thing I said to my crush my senior year in high school that made me want to crawl into a hole and die. And remembering EVERY. SINGLE. DETAIL.

Why? Usually a combination of stimulation timing, unresolved stress and trauma that never got a release, a body that never transitions out of “go” mode. You didn’t get less tired between the 2 PM brain fog and the 11 PM replay of “This is Your Embarrassing Life.” Your nervous system just found another job to do providing yourself distraction.

Next pattern: The automatic coffee reflex. A hill I will die on. I could sing the praises of caffeine all day. As a night shift worker my circadian rhythm is so fucked I often joke that my caffeine consumption is such that once I desensitize to it, my only other option will be meth or cocaine. But before that next stimulant fix, and before we find ourselves at a crack house during the next midnight flashback to the good ole awkward days, maybe ask yourself what your body actually needs in that moment. Am I actually sleepy? Or am I depleted physically / emotionally, hungry, thirsty, overwhelmed, overstimulated, or just drained from peopling all day? My fellow introverts know that last one all too well.

My point is - rest doesn’t always automatically equal recovery. The body can rest while the brain has 15 tabs open and still going full throttle. Scrolling, problem solving, responding to each and every incessant notification that comes through. We get “notification fatigue” and I’m about “this” close to chucking my Apple watch off a bridge. But after your sit, rest, while all the mental acrobatics continue in your brain, do you feel restored? Or just differently stimulated? I know my answer.

Doing nothing can genuinely feel uncomfortable if you’re used to being productive all day. You finally sit down to relax, like REALLY relax and right away the shoulds creep in: “I should be doing laundry, I should be cleaning, I should be meal prepping, I should be …” And you don’t have to fix this reaction. Just notice it. Noticing is always the first step, noticing without judgment is the second step. Your body’s response to stillness can be very informative.

But I want to leave you with this, functioning and thriving are not the same. You can get through your to-do list (unless you’re constantly adding shit to it like I do), show up for everyone who needs you, and still be running on fumes the entire time. And I think the downfall is a good many of us just feel like that’s what being a grown up feels like and accept it as the normal.

Altering habits takes time. Notice first, then small changes. Creating wind-down rituals at night. I’ve discovered the joy in tea concoctions and with my Midnight Moon creation, I started a pre sleepy time habit that’s lessened the occurred of the horrific high school flashbacks.

All the tea is 20% off this month - give yourself a little ritual too!