Why You Wake Up Tired (Even After 8 Hours of Sleep)

It's rarely one single cause. Like, I've never treated a client in over 22 years now where it's one single cause. It's always a constellation of causes, especially if it's been going on for any length of time. And all of those causes are kind of interlinked, and that's one of the reasons why people don't have a lot of luck when they try and overcome insomnia in just like one vein.

Welcome, Anna Davena, to the show.

Hello, thank you for having me.

You're welcome. I'm really excited for this topic about sleep because I'm so keen to be talking about sleep for all the insomniacs who feel that it's almost impossible to actually get a good night's sleep. Do we really need 8 hours sleep for optimal health? to function properly, or is it highly individual?

Well, it's a really good question. It is individual, but extensive studies have shown that we need around 7.5 hours, the majority of us. That's about 94% of us need that 7.5 hours. And for some, it's closer to 8, for others it's closer to 7. It depends on the length of our sleep cycle. Cycles. And then there's 3 to 5% of us that actually need closer to 9 hours. We need an extra sleep cycle. Those people know who they are. Generally, when I meet them, they really know themselves, because if they don't protect their sleep, they feel so bad, like worse than the majority of us. And then there's 1% who can get by and feel pretty good on around 6 hours. Unfortunately, those people often tout, you know, you're all sleeping too long and I'm a superhero and you should all only sleep this long. And then we compare ourselves to those people and try and get by on less sleep. That said, if we do have a daytime nap, even if it's— you know, fairly short, or even a couple of naps. If we're sleep— if we're eating very clean and we meditate, then often those kinds of people don't need as much sleep. But the general, for most of us, we need around 7.5 hours of sleep.

From a personal experience, my older sister is definitely the 9 hours And she knows it. And you're right that they really— like, she really needs that 9 hours or she doesn't function. Myself and the rest of the family, we're more like the 4 to 5.

Okay, so she would have struggled because she would have compared herself and maybe thought that she had a problem. But hopefully she understands that she has a body and brain that needs that.

I just want to know, what are some of the consequences that people can experience who are like our insomniacs listening to the show, who are experiencing 4 to 5, or if they get 5 or 6 but it's continuously broken, what are some of the consequences, like health-wise, you know, emotionally, mentally, that they're experiencing?

Well, the first thing is the impact on the brain.

Mm.

So what happens is we have a lot less brain function. I have images of brain scans from the largest studies ever done on the impact of sleep deprivation on the brain. And the amount of brain activity overall decreases so much. You just see so much less of the brain lighting up. And you've got a couple of centers that are very impacted. So the prefrontal cortex that governs our decision-making, our ability to keep a healthy perspective, our memory, our communication, all of our executive functions goes offline to a degree depending on the quality of your sleep because I talked about length of sleep, but something that isn't talked about enough is quality. You can get 7 to 8 hours of sleep and it can be very poor quality and you can wake up tired. I do corporate programs and at the beginning of them I do a survey. So I often get hundreds of people filling out this survey who tell me how long they've slept and how they feel when they wake in the morning, what their energy and clarity is. And there is a huge number of people sleeping around 7 hours still waking up tired. And that's because quality of sleep is so low. So we need to be thinking about not only how long we sleep, but the quality of our sleep. And that's getting enough deep sleep and also enough REM sleep.

And is that because they've been waking up all the time or they're just not able to go deep enough in their sleep?

It differs. So some people have that broken sleep. Others are finding it very hard to get to sleep. Some of my clients take 1, 2, even 3 hours to get to sleep, or they're waking in the night and then taking a very long time to get back to sleep or not getting back to sleep at all. Others just have a lot of broken sleep. Sometimes that's due to a partner. Sometimes it's due to other environmental factors or their system just— I mean, it can be so many things. It can be hormone dysregulation, can be blood sugar. So many different things play a role in poor quality sleep or too little sleep.

There are so many things. It's trying to filter through what it would be for you personally. You know, or even someone like you to interview someone or to speak to someone about their sleep and actually filter through all of that to find what is their core reason for—

Well, it's very rarely one single cause. Like, I've never treated a client in over 22 years now where it's one single cause. It's always a constellation of causes. Especially if it's been going on for any length of time. And all of those causes are kind of interlinked, and that's one of the reasons why people don't have a lot of luck when they try and overcome insomnia in just like one vein. So you need to be addressing all of the root— you need to first see what those root causes are and then treat them.

Mm-hmm.

Together. Like, not, not in a, you know, extreme way. That's why my sleep recovery program is 3 months.

Mm-hmm.

Because if you're sleep deprived and you have been for any length of time, it takes time to recover fully. And in the first, in the first phase, there's a lot of detoxing that's happening as well because lack of sleep causes a toxic brain. Because it's during deep sleep that the lymphatic system comes online and cleanses your brain of toxins that build up every day. So if you're sleep deprived, you literally have a toxic brain. And there's been a huge number of studies done to show that people who are sleep deprived can't even register that they're sleep deprived. This is very intelligent leaders and executives. McKinsey did a big study. And they were— their brain was working so poorly that they couldn't even recognize that they had a problem. They just think, I'm fine. So it is— it's tricky. But people who come to me, they've just had enough. They realize— they remember how they were before they were sleep deprived, and they want that clarity. They want that energy back. And they're usually just so happy they found me. They're like, I've been trying to find someone like you for such a long time. And they've tried all these single-pronged approaches. They've tried going to the doctor. They've tried all these medications as well. That's a whole other topic we should perhaps touch on. But yeah, it really is a constellation of causes, and that constellation needs to be addressed altogether in a gentle way, obviously, so that the system can adjust over time and get— It's like, I think of it like you've got— you're like a ship. And you're moving through the ocean and you're going at a pace. You know, anything that's been going for a while, it's going at a pace and it needs to slow down. It needs to stop, and then it needs to change direction and build momentum in that new direction. That's why over the decades I've been working with people, I know that it takes that long to create a change that is going to be sustained. To And to be honest, people who are on medications, I work with them for longer than that because it's actually 2 processes to wean off medication and to get your sleep recovery going and then stable.

I love this holistic approach because that's the way— it's like any health condition. And being an insomniac or being sleep deprived is a health condition. And it is not helpful for your health. It makes me think about the— when people take— they go, oh, I'm sleep deprived, just give me melatonin and I'll sleep well. And then they find it doesn't work.

Yeah.

And this is what you're saying is because it is a combination of things that have to come together, which makes me think people seem to be— well, a lot of practitioners I've heard around sleep say it's the hours before midnight that are the most important.

I've worked with people from so many different walks of life, and I always remember I worked at the Cawthron Institute in New Zealand. I lived there for 5 years in Nelson, and so I worked with all these scientists, and I loved working with them. And some of them, they wanted to work at night because they didn't have all their colleagues sending them questions and, you know, the distractions, because they're deep thinkers. And so I crafted sleep routines for these people where they would either have a short sleep and then have some time in the middle of the night to work, and then they'd get their next lot of sleep, or they'd work later and I'd coach them through how they can do that in a healthy way.

Mm-hmm.

And then go to sleep later and wake up later. So as long as we get that window, And it's quality sleep, then we're good. Now, that said, it can be easier to go to sleep for some people around that 10 PM mark when the sleepy train comes by. Because when the sleepy train comes by and we don't get on it, and we're not on it by midnight, we can get this second wind.

Mm-hmm.

And that second wind is our metabolism changing, and it's changing to give us energy for healing while we sleep. So when we feel that second wind come on around 10 or 10:30, and we're like, oh, I can watch another few episodes or whatever we're doing, it's actually the energy that our body needs to heal while we sleep, and then we burn it doing Silly things, right? So it's, it's kind of a complex issue, and people talk about chronotypes. So the people who are kind of genetically disposed to be up later and sleep later and, and all that kind of thing. So it is individual, but it's really about the amount of time we sleep and honoring, honoring who we are as individuals. And that's, you know, I don't approach my clients with, okay, this is how you're gonna be. It's that I listen to them, I learn about them, I understand what they need in their life, what their preferences are. I ask them to listen to their bodies. And a big reason why we're in a sleep loss epidemic is because we've all been overriding Our natural cues. You know, we get tired, we drink a coffee, we have some sugar, we keep going, we push through, we ignore our body until the symptom— we know we take a pill to numb the pain. The inflammation you asked me about, you know, what are signs? Inflammation is a big sign of sleep deprivation. Inflammation that shows up in different ways for people. Obesity is also another sign because when we don't get enough sleep, the peptides that regulate our digestion go completely skewed. And so we just, we need to listen to ourselves. And I think if we could put our foot on the brake a little bit more, which is what I support people through that because it can actually feel scary to stop.

Yeah.

It can feel scary to stop and feel how tired we are, how exhausted we are, how overwhelmed we are. So I very gently coach people through that and their ability to meet themselves where they are, their ability to help themselves where they are and create these new habits and build momentum in that new way.

The coffee, you know, when you're sleep deprived, you look for a stimulant. Which then plays into the fact that then you're too excited and you can't sleep. And then when you're sleep deprived, you want— looking for energy, so you end up eating more than what you normally would. And that's where you're talking about, you know, can go into obesity. And I think as a culture, we also put, you know, up on a pedestal how burnt out we could possibly be and how much we can push ourselves through something instead of Realizing that, you know, you're going too far and that you have to stop, it's like, that's almost like you're failing or something, you know. It's a weird thing that we've got ourselves into, this understanding that, you know, you're less than if you haven't got a burnout badge.

Yeah, burnout badge, that's a good way to say it.

High up on the ladder, would you put stress and nervous system dysregulation into playing as a, you know, a major player in long-term sleep issues?

Well, I'll often say in my talks that if stressed and sleepless were both on a dating app, it would be a perfect match, 100%.

That's swipe right.

Yeah, well, it's just like you just get that perfect match. They really go hand in hand. And at the beginning of my career, I was working in a workplace health and safety company, and I was a stress management coach and a sleep therapist. And always I combined both because often what will happen is our stress will go up, and that can be physiological stress, right? malnourishment or eating the wrong things. It can be purely physiological, although it's pretty rare that the body's in stress and that— and the mind isn't, or that the mind is in stress and the body isn't, you know, because they're so combined.

Yes.

But in answer to your question, they go hand in hand and they actually feed each other because sleep deprivation causes physiological and psychological stress. Physiological and psychological stress causes sleep issues. And part of that's hormonal because when you have high adrenaline, high cortisol, it suppresses the production of melatonin, which is the hormone we need for the onset of sleep.

Mm-hmm.

And that's what people don't realize. So people don't realize the things that are causing that hormonal imbalance. And obviously, like, different people with different habits, or, you know, I talk about the internal landscape. When the internal landscape is one of tension and stress, it's very hard for the system to calm down. And I talk about also crossing 2 bridges to get to sleep. The first bridge is the bridge from your everyday life into bed. And for a lot of people, that's a hard bridge to cross now because we've got so many things that we're addicted to that are stimulating us and keeping us awake. But then there's the bridge once you're horizontal of getting to sleep. And different people, you know, they cross those bridges in different ways. Then there's another bridge often for— it's around 60% of people who wake up in the night. And then find it very hard to get back to sleep. When we don't have a sleep education, which none of us do, it's quite bizarre to me that we're meant to spend a third of our lives asleep. That's 30 years in an average lifespan, but we don't receive a sleep education and we don't make it important enough to learn about. You know, some people might think about my program of 3 months as being long, But when you look at that in the context of a lifetime, when sleep is something you're meant to be doing 8 hours in every 24 hours, that is— if you think about driving, we don't even drive that long, and we put a lot of energy and time into learning how to drive. So I, I find it incredible that people don't think and understand how valuable it is to know how to get the best quality sleep they can. How much they're paying, the price they're paying to not have that, the quality of life they're missing out on, the health risks, the relationship issues, the ability to contribute well, all of these things are the prices we pay. It's incredible to me. But then you've gotta think, I'm speaking to a sleep-deprived world that doesn't have its brain on properly.

That is such an amazing point. You know, like 30 years out of our lifespan is incredible. That's why— well, that's where that saying, you know, I'll sleep when I'm dead. Well, you know, it couldn't be truer, really. Now I realize why we love to medicate instead of relearning, like getting the skill to relearn how to sleep, because you never learned how to do it in the first place.

No. And you said relearn, but it's really learn. You know, I had sleeping issues as a child and young adult, and I never learned, you know. And it took me a dedication to switch my patterns around. And for me, it was a lot of underlying anxiety. I was also very inspired and creative. So one of my sleep hazards is my creative mind.

Yes.

And my inspired and excited self. You know, I get, I get very lit up about things and I'm very passionate about my mission. So I have to be very careful or I can be up planning and, and, you know, creating too late and then my sleep's not great and then I pay for it. But I, because I know the price, like I'll often say to people, how do you want to feel? How do you want to feel when you wake up in the morning? How do you want to feel as you live your one precious life every day? We never get that day back. So do we want to live it in the gray zone of feeling half awake and lethargic and our brain taking 10 times as long to do anything than it could? Or do we want to feel 100% alive? And able to be present and able to feel inspired, you know, and meet people with enthusiasm.

It's very hard to have that passion and ooze that passion when you're tired and you can hardly keep your eyes open. Either we're working against our biology or we're working against the natural circadian rhythm, or we're overthinkers like you were saying, and, you know, we can't calm ourselves down. So What can we do to start aligning ourselves with our natural rhythms, you know, to start reclaiming our sleep?

Well, the first thing is to recognize that we don't have to go out into nature. It's very helpful to do that, but the reason I say that is we are nature. Our bodies are part of nature. They're part of the natural world. You know, you look, you look at our bodies, they're mainly water. You know, they're minerals. And where we are in a sense more like animals— well, not in a sense, we're much more like an animal than a screen, right? We breathe, we eat, we wake up. We should wake up in tune with the sun. And I say, you know, attune, reattune to the sun. We have brain cells in our eyes that are designed to read the amount of light in the environment. Those brain cells send a signal to the part of our brain that regulates our sleep-wake cycle. It's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. That part of our brain then triggers hormones for either being awake or asleep. So a big part of what our body's looking for is the signal of light and the signal of dark to regulate our sleep-wake cycle. So the most powerful thing you can do is get yourself into the sunlight or natural light, full spectrum light, as early as you can in the morning. That gives you a better, more energized start to the day than coffee. You can think of a dose of sunlight in the morning better than coffee, and it will give you energy that is sustained rather than energy that lifts you and then crashes like coffee or like being on your phone. And so you think of sunlight is like coffee, and then darkness. is better than any sleeping pill at night. So being in a low-light environment, wearing glasses that block the blue light in screens if you do have to be on screens, or replacing your bulbs with amber globes. You can see behind me, that's an amber globe. It's a globe that doesn't contain blue light. And so on a superficial— not superficial, but, you know, on a simple level— For people that don't have deep issues, if you just change your light exposure, just change the signals that your body is getting, your brain is getting through light exposure, that will have a hugely positive impact. I once had a woman come up to me. It was pre-COVID. And she came up to me in a bank. It was in Nelson, New Zealand. She runs up to me and she says, Can I give you a hug? I was like, okay. Because I'm just so grateful to you. I was at one of your talks, and all we did in our household was change the lights. That's all we did. And our entire lives have changed. Our kids go to sleep easier. We get deeper sleep. All of our relationships are better, our health is better. And she just— and then she had tears well up in her eyes. She goes, we were in such a bad place before that, and that's all we did. And so there is a percentage of people where that would be enough.

And that's changing all your light globes to amber, to yellow.

You don't have to change all, just have one lamp in each room that's amber. Notice when the sun sets, okay? And just notice it. Recognize, okay, the natural light in the environment is changing. And so how can I mirror that in my home rather than just flicking a switch, turning night into day, and confusing your body so hugely? We don't think about it. My grandfather was born into a home without light switches. My mother was born into a home without even a television. I was born into a home without a computer. Look at how much— like, it's not just light bulbs, but light bulbs are a big part of the issue aside from screens. We just turn the lights on. We don't think about what that's doing to us hormonally.

Yes.

We don't think about how the body's designed to respond to that overhead light, which should be the sun. And we get more and more awake. We've only had artificial light in our lives for around 100 years. That's a very small amount of time. And it's about that time, that length of time, that sleep quality and length has been decreasing. In 1942, we slept an average of 7.9 hours a night. That was the average human sleep.

Wow.

length. Now it's closer to 6.5. And, and I don't— you know, teens, 90% of teens are sleep deprived. We're getting up to 50% of school-aged children sleep deprived. And if you get me talking about children, I will end up ranting because it's such another episode, I think. Yeah, it's, it's— they are suffering the most.

They are, with all that blue light, with all the electronics, with everything.

It's— and just— and, and adults who are Modeling not respecting rest, not respecting the recovery that our body needs. We have to think of sleep as recovery that we need or we're going to get sick. We're also chronically ill, or many, many, many of us, because we don't recover. We don't give ourselves time to really recover. And it should— there should be recovery periods during the day, whether it's 5 minutes. 10 minutes, 1 minute. We're not meant to be on all day. We're just not.

A lot of people are strung out. Their nervous systems are just so tight. I think a question to ask someone, if someone's annoyed with you or angry, instead of being angry back, I think we should all adopt with, how much sleep have you had?

Yeah, but then they'll probably get really angry.

And then they'll get really angry.

The other part of the brain that I didn't mention earlier that gets impacted is the amygdala. And the amygdala is the part of the brain that recognizes threats. And what happens is the amygdala gets overactive when you don't have too much sleep.

Mm-hmm.

So you actually have this sense of being threatened and you are overreactive because of that. So you have an under-functioning prefrontal cortex that allows you to make good decisions and communicate well. And then you have an overactive amygdala So you are, you can basically fly off the handle because you're more emotional, and that's coming from what's happening in your brain. That's not to mention the toxic buildup of beta amyloid and other very dangerous toxins in your brain that just make you foggy. It's a, it's quite a serious combination. You know, it's a serious cocktail. that people die from. You know, people have car accidents, marriages end, um, children are damaged for a long time when they have parents who are sleep deprived who are yelling at them a lot, let alone their own sleep deprivation that happens because of that stress. I mean, that's— I'm going into why I do my foundation work with that description, but— Yeah, the world, it's a crazy world. Crazy.

You can understand a lot of risk behavior around, you know, people who are sleep deprived, chronically sleep deprived for a long time. You can see that sort of risk behavior, you know, in driving, in, in responding, in overdrinking, whatever it is.

1 in 3 have chronic sleep deprivation. And then it's another third that have very regular poor sleep.

It's an epidemic.

It's an epidemic. The WHO said we're in a sleep loss epidemic. And even Matthew Walker, he's the world's leading scientist and researcher on sleep, he says, you know, it's getting worse every year. He spent as much time in the lab as I've spent with humans one-to-one. I would actually love to get together with him. I think if we had a love child, it would be this incredible being who could like solve this problem. But yeah, I would love to join forces with him. And because he's really good at talking about the statistics and the dangers, he shows that We die earlier when we don't get enough sleep. He shows how linked poor sleep is to very serious health issues like cancer and stroke and heart disease, Alzheimer's. He shows that link. Mental health. He says that there isn't one mental health issue that can't be linked to sleep. And sometimes that's oversleeping, but generally it's not getting enough sleep.

Anna, can you leave our audience with just a few bullet points on what you would like to see them start doing now to get that restful sleep?

Well, the first thing is to be very honest with yourself about your sleep mindset. Is sleep high on your values list?

Mm.

How much do you value rest? Do you understand that it is necessary for you to have quality rest and recovery to be well, to function well, to feel fantastic? So a lot of people, it's not even kind of— a lot of people will say, I want better sleep, but it's actually still not on their values list. So asking yourself, how do I wanna feel? And then understanding or recognizing or doing whatever you need to do to, to understand that great sleep is going to give you so much. And then having that come up on your values list. That's really number one. Deciding that it is important to you and valuing it. And the second thing would be to acknowledge that you've potentially been looking in the direction of not sleeping well. You know, if you decided you wanted to go to Spain, like, I really want to go to Spain, what would you do? You would read about Spain. You would talk to other people about Spain. You would book tickets. You'd take all the little steps you need to take until one day you're standing there in Barcelona or wherever you're going to go and you're like, I'm here. You don't say, I want to go to Spain, and then spend all of your energy and attention on Russia. Because then where would you end up? You would end up in Russia. And it's the same for people who can't sleep. All of their attention is on not sleeping. I can't sleep. It's so bad. Complaining all the time, focusing on not sleeping rather than turning their attention to, I have a natural ability to sleep well. My body knows how to sleep. I was born with this ability. I'm out of sync. I know I can get back to it, and I'm going to focus on sleeping well, learning how to sleep well, putting attention into that, investing in whatever I need to for that to be my reality. Most people I coach are so— have been so focused on not sleeping well, that is what's feeding The cycle because they're in that and they're stressing themselves out and they're just focusing on how bad it is. So that would be number 2. Number 3 would be attuning to the sun.

Mm-hmm.

So starting to bring your body back into rhythm with the sun and getting that morning sunlight, which gives you healthy wake-up hormones in the morning. And it also sets a timer for your melatonin at night.

Oh.

And then getting that low light at night and noticing how that affects you in a very positive way. And then committing to shifting your inner landscape. Most people have an inner landscape that isn't supportive of really resting and being able to cope with that busy mind. So getting good at that, that's a big part of what I do with people, is help them to shift their inner landscape to one that supports feeling calm, that is resourced. It doesn't feel lost and taken over. You know, most people feel hijacked. They say to me when they come to me, it's like they're hijacked by their brain and They're all over the place. So learning and understanding that there's skills you can learn, there's a capacity you can build so that your inner world is one that is supportive of being able to truly rest and bring yourself down out of that very busy mental place.

Especially, I love the reframe because we do tend to focus on the negative of what's happening in our lives instead of, you know, oh, I can change this, or I will say that I am a good sleeper. I mean, I know myself. How many times have I got up in the morning and said, oh, I've had a crap night's sleep, you know, or I've had a terrible night's sleep, or I'll go to bed, you know, a little bit wired and I think, oh, I'm not going to sleep. You know, it's that mental talk that you're talking yourself out of it, you know. So these are fantastic tips. And for all our insomniacs who are listening, or people who are just chronically sleep deprived or want to learn how to have a better night's sleep, All of Anna's details will be in the show notes. Do contact her because, you know, it is really a skill, and Anna is the one to teach you. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

You're welcome.