Lifestyle

Doctor explains how to calculate your ideal bedtime to wake up feeling refreshed

Doctor explains how to calculate your ideal bedtime to wake up feeling refreshed
Photo by Bruce Mars on Unsplash

Have you ever woken up from a nap or a decent night’s rest of 8 hours of sleep with eye crusties and all, yet still feel exhausted?

At times, it seems that no matter how little or how much time you get to sleep, the feelings of exhaustion can still trickle into the day.

But as reported in the Mirror UK, Dr Karan Raj, an insightful doctor who has over 3.4 million followers took to his TikTok to give some expertise into sleep schedules.

Dr Raj shared a video, titled “90 minute rule”  to calculate the perfect time for you to fall asleep. He also discusses the reason for feeling exhausted after a night's worth of sleep, which boils down to waking up in the middle of a sleep cycle rather than not getting enough sleep at all.

Dr. Karan Raj on the “90 minute rule”

Explaining the video caption, “Try this to wake up feeling refreshed!” he said the following:

“ Every night your brain moves through several sleep cycles each cycle starts with light sleep, then deep, then dream, and back to light sleep... each of these cycles is around 90 minutes,” Dr Raj begins.

Read more:

Dr. Karan Raj explaining sleep cycles

“ To feel more refreshed, wake up at the end of all of these 90 minute cycles because you’re closest to your normal waking state. To increase the chances of this, first, figure out what time you want to wake up,” he continues.

90 minute cycles.

The example of a time he gives waking up at 8am, in order to calculate, he suggests that you work backwards in 90-minute blocks until you get to your desired sleep time. So if you go to bed at 10 pm, you should wake up around the fifth and sixth cycles of your sleep.

The video garnered over 1.6 million views, with many comments of people giving praise for their sleep questions being answered and whether they found that this advice interesting or helpful

“This is trippy because this morning I was literally thinking about how I cannot deal with how challenging every morning is and what I can do to solve,” said a commenter. Dr. Raj responded to this comment with, “fate has been answered.”

“That probably explains why I wake up every couple of hours.....interesting,” wrote another commenter.

Dr Raj also addressed in the comments that this won’t work every person because we experience “fluctuations in the length of our sleep cycles,” but it’s still some great food for thought. Cheers to better sleep!

Check out Dr Karan Raj’s video here.

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