Dr. Matt Walker

Many people, however, will experience something called sleep inertia, which is this, it's almost this just period of time, a bit like a sleep hangover, the first hour.

I'm going to have to come back to a car analogy.

It's like a classic car engine where you don't just pull out and you can rev it and it's, you know, it just needs, you need to warm it up, gradually bring the oil temps up.

And at that point, after about an hour, you're up to operating temperature and you're good to go.

It's the sense of, okay, I walk through into the kitchen and sort of your partner maybe looks at the dishes and I say, I know darling, I know I said I was gonna wash the dishes.

I'm so sorry, I forgot, but can I just have my cup of coffee and I'll be the very best version of myself in about an hour.

Can we discuss it then?

Cause right now I'm not the best version of myself.

That's sleep inertia.

And that is natural for many people.

Now, if you are an evening type and you're waking up early, you're going to have a much heavier sleep inertia period than you would do that is natural to you.

But I wouldn't necessarily use that as the direct measure because many people will have sleep inertia.

And if you do, you may get worried if I say, oh, it's the very best measure that you're not getting quality of sleep.

The postprandial dip, as you mentioned there before, even you, the monumental organism called Andrew Huberman, even you can fall prey to that and do fall prey to that.

Every day.

that postprandial dip then i really love it and you yep and when i bounce right out of that and we'll speak about how we were designed to sleep maybe in in a later episode too and whether that should be the way human beings are sleeping so i wouldn't necessarily use that i'm or i always have this postprandial dip does that mean i should be worried about sleep i would say that if you have excessive daytime sleepiness throughout the day where you're constantly tired

And that is a term that we use in sleep medicine is excessive daytime sleepiness or EDS.

That should be of a concern.

I would use a slightly different metric of the same question, but at a different time of day.

Let's think about that circadian rhythm again.