While it’s normal to feel like rewarding yourself with more sleep in the morning, especially if you stayed up late at night, it could point to a more serious problem if it happens every morning. You should seek the help of a physician if you always find it difficult to crawl from underneath your comforter and open your window curtains to let in the light, even after sleeping for more than seven hours.
But precisely why is it so hard to get out of bed in the morning? This article discusses the most common reasons why you feel this way.
Main Reasons Why It’s Hard to Get out of Bed in the Morning
Waking up and getting out of bed in the morning is the greatest struggle for most people, especially when it’s cold and chilly outside. But somehow we always find the energy to get up and go about our day like everyone else. Unfortunately, for some people, it’s a real struggle, even when they’ve every important reason to get out of bed. Here are the main reasons why this might happen to you.
1. Dysania
Dysania is a medical disorder that’s mainly characterized by the desire to stay in bed and extend sleep. It makes it extremely difficult for you to get out of bed in the morning. This disorder is commonly likened to clinomania – a profound obsession with sleep and a desire to stay in bed.
Although these disorders are quite common, they aren’t widely recognized in the health industry. Many medical professionals use the term clinophilia to refer to the extraordinary desire to stay in bed in the morning. Although most people with clinophilia, clinomania, or dysania spend most of their time in bed, the amount of sleep they have doesn’t necessarily increase.
So, if you’ve always had trouble getting out of bed, you should be checked for dysania, clinomania, or clinophilia. Please note that these aren’t standalone disorders. In most instances, they appear as symptoms of other serious conditions. That’s why it’s important to seek a doctor’s advice if you suspect that you have any of these disorders.
You might also experience other symptoms alongside any of these disorders, depending on what causes them. Other symptoms of dysania include excessive sleepiness during the day and extreme fatigue. But does it mean that you have dysania every time you don’t feel like getting out of bed in the morning?
The answer is no. Dysania is characterized by an extreme obsession with staying in bed, even when you don’t have sleep. Moreover, the amount of sleep people have and the time they spend in bed differs depending on their age and health.
If possible, you should only use your bed for sleeping, sex, and resting when you’re sick. That way, you’ll improve the quality of sleep at night. An average adult requires between 7 and 9 hours of good quality sleep at night. So, use this time range to determine if your extreme desire to stay in bed is normal or related to disorders like dysania, clinophilia, and clinomania.
2. How Many Hours You Sleep
As noted above, you could be struggling to get out of bed in the morning because you don’t get enough sleep. If you stay up all night and try to get up after only one or two hours of sleep, you’ll have a really hard time lifting that comforter off your body. Your body requires enough time to rest and wind down after a long, wearisome day at work.
Therefore, if you disrupt your normal sleeping routine by running errands that eat into your sleeping time, you’ll have a hard time waking up in the morning. Our bodies are wired to follow a specific sleeping routine. So, when you mess with it, you’ll suffer serious consequences like lacking the energy to get out of bed.
Your brain creates the circadian rhythm that determines when you sleep and wake up. Adults experience a natural dip in alertness between 2 am and 4 am and in the afternoon between 1 pm and 3 pm. That’s why you experience the mid-afternoon slump. So, going to bed late will disrupt this rhythm, causing your brain to send the wrong signals.
For instance, you’ll feel sleepy when you’re supposed to be awake and stay awake when you ought to be asleep. Ultimately, this will affect your schedule and cause you to want to extend your stay in bed.
3. Weekend Lie-Ins
As discussed above, whenever you extend your sleep, you disrupt your circadian rhythm, which eventually interferes with your overall schedule. So, while you may be tempted to lie in on weekends, it won’t do you any good. Instead, it’ll result in more groggy mornings, especially on Mondays.
This concept is commonly known as social jet lag. It causes a major misalignment of your natural and social schedules thus disrupting your daily activities. Sleeping in on weekends and holidays will make you feel like you have actual jet lag because your body gets used to the new schedule.
You’ll feel like you suddenly exist in a whole different time zone. That’s why many psychologists and wellness experts advise schools and employers to adjust their daily schedules to suit different biological clocks.
4. Urge to Snooze
We’ve all been culprits of hitting the snooze button to allow ourselves to nestle under the bed covers a little longer. Like the weekend lie-in, pressing the snooze button will only disrupt your circadian rhythm and make it hard for you to wake up when you need to. So, although the urge to hit that button may be too strong, you shouldn’t give in because it will have serious consequences.
If you close your eyes for a few seconds after the morning alarm goes off, your brain automatically returns to a sleep cycle. The interesting thing about this situation is that you end up getting back into a deeper stage of sleep, which makes it even harder for you to get out of bed when the alarm goes off again.
So, be disciplined enough to set your alarm for the exact time you need to wake up and get up when it goes off. Your body starts preparing to wake up an hour and a half before the actual time, so it has enough time to prepare to wake up when the alarm blows up.
5. Your Genes
While there are many effective techniques to create a blissful sleep routine, some people have to deal with deeper issues because the problem of sleepiness is ingrained in their DNA. Overcoming this struggle can be quite difficult because there’s nothing you can do to alter it. Your genes determine whether you’ll be a “lark” or an “owl”.
If you struggle to find sleep at night, you’ll definitely struggle to wake up in the morning. And if you feel sleepy during the day, you’ll have long sleepless nights. This will eventually become your daily routine. Sadly, it will negatively impact other aspects of your life, including your productivity at work and performance at school.
As if that’s not bad enough, these genes are the same ones that determine your body weight. Therefore, if you’re an early riser, you’re likely to be thinner than someone who struggles to get out of bed in the morning.
6. Seasons
There’s scientific evidence showing why it’s more difficult to get out of bed in the winter than in summer. Our sleep patterns are mainly based on our surroundings, especially light. Your body should wake up naturally when the light of dawn comes. Since winters are darker, your body will have a hard time waking up in the morning, even when the alarm goes off.
7. Your Smartphone
In this era of smartphones and social media, many people can’t put their devices down to get some sleep. They continue scrolling through social media platforms and chatting with friends all night. This behavior will interfere with your sleeping pattern, making it hard for you to get out of bed in the morning.
Addiction to smartphones and social media is now a serious menace in our society, affecting everyone regardless of their age. Unfortunately, the blue light emitted by LCD screens disrupts the production of melatonin in our brains, making it difficult for us to fall asleep. This light is useful during the day because it keeps you awake and alert, but it will delay your sleep at night.