4 Ways To Beat Sleep Inertia & Start Your Day With Less Grogginess

Think back to how you got out of bed this morning: Did you perk up without an alarm, ready to take on the day? Or did you begrudgingly press snooze only to wake up a few minutes later wishing you were still asleep? It turns out, that groggy morning feeling many of us are all too familiar with has a name: Sleep inertia.

In a 2017 literature review aptly named Waking up is the hardest thing I do all day1, "sleep inertia" was defined as "the transitional state between sleep and wake, marked by impaired performance, reduced vigilance, and a desire to return to sleep."

Sleep researchers aren't totally sure what causes or intensifies sleep inertia, but they suspect it has something to do with the body's circadian rhythm, also known as our internal clock.

In one small study on emergency workers2 who need to be "on" as soon as they wake up, the effect of sleep inertia was tested throughout the night. Twelve workers were woken up at various points of the night and early morning and asked to solve math equations (sounds fun, no?).

Their cognitive performance seemed to be lower when they were woken up during the "biological night," when their bodies' circadian clocks were telling them it was time to sleep, indicating that this clock can contribute to grogginess and increased processing time.

When the internal clock is off—either because of a change in scenery or a late-night—the dreaded sleep inertia might feel worse. That's where magnesium comes in.

As a GABA agonist, magnesium is an essential mineral with important relaxing actions to help calm the body and mind for sleep.* Magnesium may also increase melatonin, helping keep our circadian rhythms running smoothly and by extension, easing grogginess.* And case in point, clinical studies of magnesium supplementation3 have shown this mineral to improve not only the time it takes to fall asleep and overall sleep duration but also early morning wakening.*

"If one comes to the end of a full night's sleep, one wakes up naturally—that's the ideal way to wake up," Girardin Jean-Louis, Ph.D., professor of population health and psychiatry at New York University, previously told mbg. To get your body used to waking up refreshed without an alarm, keeping a consistent bedtime and wake-up time is key—even on weekends.

Ideally, you can schedule bedtime so that you go to bed around three hours after sunset and wake up with the sunrise. "When the body wakes up at the end of a sleep cycle, after sufficient sleep, and it happens to coincide with sunrise, that's the sweet spot when you're most likely to feel good upon waking," says holistic psychiatrist Ellen Vora, M.D.