Sleep: The Psychological Paradox of Oversleeping and Why Our Brains Betray Us...
We’ve all been there—after a long, indulgent sleep, you expect to be refreshed and ready to seize the day. Instead, you wake up feeling like your brain is still stuck in a foggy dream world, as if you’d overshot the “refresh” button and entered a state of post-hibernation disorientation. Why does oversleeping sometimes leave us more exhausted than a 6-hour snooze? The answer, as it turns out, isn’t just in our muscles; it’s all in our psychology. The Sleep Cycle: A Mind-Boggling Roller Coaster Our sleep isn’t a uniform state of rest. It’s a dynamic, ever-changing roller coaster that consists of several stages—light sleep, deep sleep, and REM sleep. Each cycle, lasting around 90 minutes, is like a mini-episode in the nightly drama of our brain’s inner workings. The key psychological twist? When you oversleep, you might wake up in the midst of deep sleep, a state in which your brain is less prepared for the sudden jolt of morning. This abrupt interruption can leave you feeling disorien...