I want to say something that’s going to sound dramatic and isn’t supposed to. I had forgotten what mornings were supposed to feel like.
For years, I’d been waking up tired. Not sleepy-tired. Bone-tired. Like the night had not happened. Like the sleep account hadn’t been deposited into.
GLP-1 wasn’t on my radar as a sleep intervention. It wasn’t sold to me as anything related to sleep at all. But within probably six weeks of starting it, my mornings started doing something they hadn’t done in years. I started waking up before my alarm. I started feeling rested. I started, occasionally, lying in bed for a few extra minutes not because I couldn’t get up but because I was enjoying being awake. That last one was the shock. I had not enjoyed the first ten minutes of a morning in maybe a decade.
I’d been getting sleep, but not the right kind
This is the part I didn’t understand for the longest time. I was in bed for the hours. The hours were on the calendar. I could account for them.
But the hours weren’t doing for me what hours are supposed to do for a person. I’d get up and feel like I needed eight more. And I’d assumed, for a long time, that this was just what being a woman over forty was. That morning fog was the cost of doing business.
My bedtime habits hadn’t changed when I started GLP-1. I went to bed at roughly the same time. I had roughly the same number of hours available for sleep. What changed was the quality of what was happening during those hours. And that quality, it turns out, is the whole game. The hours on the calendar are a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.
Whatever was going on, was happening in the deep part
I don’t know all the science. What I do know is that there are layers to sleep, and the layers nearest the bottom are where the actual rest happens. The repair. The processing. The part that determines whether you wake up like a person or like an old wet rag.
My bottom layers, somewhere along the line, had gone shallow. I was sleeping the way a stone skips across water. Touching down. Not sinking in.
The theories I’ve read on why GLP-1 might be doing this center on a few things. The reduced inflammation. The more stable blood sugar overnight. The lighter digestive load before bed. Probably all of these at once, working together, instead of any single one of them. Whatever the mechanism, the outcome is that I’m sinking now. I’m landing somewhere down deep. And the mornings are different because of it.
When I started actually sinking in, mornings rearranged themselves
I noticed it on a Saturday. I woke up before my alarm and didn’t immediately want to be unconscious again.
I lay there for a minute trying to figure out what was different. Nothing in the room was different. The weather wasn’t different. It was just that whatever had happened during the night had actually happened. I had landed somewhere deep. I had come back up.
My husband, who has lived with my morning fog for two decades, noticed before I did. He said, you’ve been weirdly cheerful in the mornings lately. I said, have I. He said, yes. You used to be a small dragon for the first hour. You haven’t been a dragon in like a month. That sentence was when I started really paying attention to what was happening.
Daytime alertness is a thing I’d given up on
I used to white-knuckle through the afternoons. I’d drive home from work in a state that, looking back, I am not sure was actually safe. I’d been doing it for so long that I had calibrated to it. I thought it was normal. It was not normal.
I don’t drive home like that anymore. That alone is worth a lot to me. Probably worth more than I can put on a list. Driving while half-asleep is not something I want any woman, including myself, doing for decades on end.
The ripple effect of being actually rested, instead of perpetually almost-rested, is bigger than I would have predicted. I’m a different parent in the evenings. I’m a different driver. I’m a different worker at 3pm. None of these were things I was optimizing for when I started GLP-1. All of these have come along for the ride. The list of side effects that nobody warned me about keeps getting longer.
The thing I’d want my old self to know
If you wake up tired most mornings, please don’t fold it into your identity. Don’t say, oh, I’m just a tired person. Don’t say, well, this is my forties.
It might be your forties. It might be something else. Worth asking. Worth not accepting. I accepted it for far too long and I lost real years to it. Years where I should have been awake. I’m awake now and I want everybody else to be too.
If you’re considering GLP-1 and sleep wasn’t even on your list of reasons, please put it on the list. Not as a guarantee. Nothing in this category is a guarantee. But as a meaningfully possible side effect that, for me and for at least three other women I’ve since asked, was the change we would not trade back for any of the others. The body, when supported in the upstream places, sleeps better. The sleep, in turn, makes everything else possible. It is, in many ways, the foundation underneath all the other foundations.
