All that matters is that you power through it-or seek help if it starts to take over your life. It doesn’t really matter which particular strategy you employ to make it past the post-lunch dip. Reid says.Īssuming you can’t suddenly become, like, the Maharishi of sleep and obliterate the post-lunch dip altogether, you’ll have to settle for making daytime sleepiness suck less. “If I sleep poorly tonight, and I sleep decent the next night, I still may not have caught up from that prior bad night,” Dr. Van Dongen says, “and it’s an illusion that we can really accomplish that in today’s society.” Even getting a few nights of good sleep probably isn’t enough to cure your exhaustion. But “nobody has the time to really do that,” Dr. The best way to eliminate the dip is to consistently get a great night’s sleep, ideally every night. And then you experience that post-lunch dip.” And so as you go from the morning into the afternoon, you’ve got just ever so slightly-but noticeably-some pressure for sleep from the homeostatic system that the circadian clock, the biological clock, hasn’t caught up with yet. “The buildup of the pressure for sleep runs a little ahead of when the biological clock is kicking in enough pressure to counteract it. “That biological clock and that homeostatic process don’t really align as carefully as they did when you were fully rested,” Dr. The result of that lack of sleep? The post-lunch dip. But when you don’t get enough sleep, the system gets out of whack. When you’re truly well rested-say, you’ve gotten seven-plus hours of sleep every night for a week, at about the same time each night, and woken up around the same time each day-your homeostatic drive and your biological clock work perfectly in tandem, your energy levels are normal, and you don’t experience the post-lunch dip. “But that’s actually not likely the cause at all.” The real explanation behind the most common cause is rooted in two biological phenomena, which you can think of, essentially, as two little machines whirring away inside your body: your homeostatic sleep drive, and your circadian rhythm. “For the longest time, we thought it was food-related,” Dr. Why do I suddenly feel major tiredness in the afternoon?Īs it turns out, the “post-lunch dip” is a bit of a misnomer. If you, too, regularly get overwhelmed by afternoon grogginess, take heart: There are solutions to our terrible, no-good, very bad problem. To get a better understanding of where my sudden-onset tiredness comes from, and for a few tips on banishing it from my life forever, I called up two experts on the science of sleep: Hans Van Dongen, PhD, the director of the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University and Kathryn Reid, PhD, a research professor of neurology at Northwestern Medicine.
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