This article first appeared on mindbodygreen.com
Photo: twenty20
The Science of Being “Overtired” & the Magic Bedtime
Overtired happens when you don’t fall asleep when you’re tired, and the body releases cortisol, a stress hormone, to meet the demands of staying awake. This results in wakefulness and sometimes a stress response. Overtired babies are irritable, and it paradoxically gets harder rather than easier to get them to sleep. It slowly dawned on me that adults suffer from the same issue. When babies get overtired, they’re irritable and they cry. For adults, it can manifest as feeling tired but wired, a state of mind in which we can’t shut off our minds just as we’re trying to fall asleep.
The fact is, there’s a window of time when you’re sleepy. For most of us, that’s about three hours after sunset, or somewhere in the range of 9 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. in our local time zones. If we push through and stay up past that window, whether it’s because we need to finish work, check off a few more boxes on the to-do list, or we get sucked into one more episode on Netflix, our body thinks: Oh! We’re not going to sleep even though we’re tired; there must be a good reason: We must be at war or on the great transcontinental migration. In an effort to help us meet the demands of whatever may be keeping us up, the body releases cortisol, which gives us a jolt of energy, wakefulness, and stress. Thousands of years ago, this response was helpful for survival. But today is a different story. For us, this can feel like anxiety, panic, agitated wakefulness, or racing thoughts, even though we’re exhausted. With cortisol coursing through the veins, we attempt to crawl into bed at midnight, or 1 a.m., and, big surprise, we can’t sleep.
