You may still feel tired when you wake up in the morning after a good night’s sleep. After doing the math, you realize that you technically got enough sleep or even tried to go to bed earlier and feel frustrated that you didn’t get the benefits of a good night’s sleep when you woke up. One potential reason for this is that you haven’t been getting as much sleep as you think.

The term junk sleep has more than 36 million hits on TikTok, but if you have yet to hear of it, you can learn how to deal with it and what causes it by recognizing it. Can and how can you beat it?

What are the signs of poor-quality sleep?

For many of us, waking up feeling tired is a given. Logically, we need a few minutes and a few cups of coffee or tea to become fully awake. But under what conditions does insufficient sleep become an issue that we should address?

When you feel so tired, you even doubt whether you have slept! And can you work? You might wake up and feel like you haven’t even slept. You wake up feeling restless, confused, or irritable. This type of sleep does not help us recover our bodily functions and hinders the quality of the day ahead. We will not be able to be emotionally, mentally, or physically.

You may feel anxious, depressed, forgetful, distracted, or irritable. In the long term, you may get sick sooner, experience chronic pain, have digestive or cardiovascular problems, or feel extremely tired. Additionally, you may notice changes in your eating patterns. Another lesser-known symptom of this problem is eating more than usual or experiencing increased hunger hormones.

Your environment, lifestyle habits, and mental health can all be reasons why you experience poor quality sleep.

What causes poor quality sleep, and how to solve this problem?

Many factors can contribute to poor quality sleep, some of which are more effective than others. Here’s what you need to know and what you can do:

Environmental factors

Various noises can keep you from falling asleep during the night, such as children waking up, pets, traffic, your spouse snoring, or someone watching TV at home. Other factors, such as too hot or too cold air in the sleeping environment, sleeping on an uncomfortable mattress, physical pain, illness, and too much light, also harm sleep quality.

Our emotions also affect the quality of sleep. When people are anxious or depressed, they often have trouble sleeping, which many factors, including low self-esteem, guilt, anger, or general hopelessness, can cause.

Adjust what you can; For example, it can be done by buying a soft mattress cover, turning on the air conditioning system, installing thick curtains, taking medicine to relieve stomach reflux, and making sure you eat enough, so you don’t wake up hungry, using earplugs and so on—placing stressful devices such as laptops and phones in another room.

Behavioral factors

These variables are mostly under your control, such as spending time on the internet on your phone or watching movies late at night. It is better to put your phone away an hour before going to sleep. Phones disrupt your sleep cycle because the bright blue light emitted from LED screens on electronic devices is a sleep disruptor that tricks your brain into thinking it’s still daytime, so you won’t feel sleepy when it is.

While not using a cell phone is a better option, if you’re going to use your cell phone in bed, at least put it on night mode, which reduces blue light emissions and dims the screen.