E029 Rest & Repair: Sleeping But Still Tired? What Your Brain Is Doing Overnight

Slept through the night but woke up feeling tired? This episode will show you why that's happening. We'll look at what your brain is doing overnight and why sleep doesn't always leave you feeling rested. 

Some nights you fall asleep easily and wake up feeling fine. Other nights you wake during the night, drift in and out of sleep or hit snooze multiple times in the morning. If that sounds familiar, your sleep is likely being interrupted across the night. The $7 Season Mapping Quiz will help you see where you're at right now and what your body needs next so you can start waking up feeling more refreshed. 

Rest & Repair: Sleeping But Still Tired? What Your Brain Is Doing Overnight

In this episode of The GA Wellness Podcast, I break down what happens after you fall asleep and how your brain goes through different sleep cycles. We look at how your day seeps into your sleep and why you can wake up feeling clear some mornings and exhausted on others. 

📋 What we covered:

• Why you can sleep for hours and still wake up feeling tired
• What your brain is doing while you are asleep
• How sleep cycles work and why they matter
• What happens during dreams & how your brain works through the day overnight
• Why good sleep helps you wake up feeling clearer the next day
• The difference between sleep quality and sleep quantity
• Why you can wake up feeling groggy or not fully awake
• Why hitting snooze can leave you feeling more tired
• What happens when your brain does not complete its sleep cycles
• How interruptions like noise, temperature and notifications affect your sleep
• How your sleep can change depending on what is happening in your life

🧰 Rest & Repair: Sleep Cycle Check-In

A simple check-in to understand what your body needs before bed so you can start winding down more easily.

👉 link coming soon

🧭 Season Mapping Quiz

A simple way to identify your current season and know what your body needs so you can start supporting it right away.

👉 https://gawellness.myflodesk.com/seasonquiz

🌟 Key takeaways:

• Sleeping longer doesn’t always leave you feeling rested
• Your brain keeps working overnight, even when you’re asleep
• Interrupted sleep shows up in how you feel the next day
• What happens during your sleep matters just as much as how long you’re in bed
• When you understand your sleep patterns, it becomes easier to support your energy 

🔁 Episodes referenced in this episode:

E028 Rest & Repair: Tired But Can’t Switch Off at Night? Why Your Mind Won’t Slow Down
E016 Mobility Matters: Restorative Movement for Busy Women

🎧 Related listening:

E004 Self-Care Beyond Bubble Baths: Nurturing Your Nervous System
E008 The Myth of Balance: Let’s Talk Seasons
E009 Let’s Talk Integration: The Secret Ingredient to Real Change 

If you’ve been waking up tired, this will help you understand why and give you a simple place to start so you can feel more rested. 

📱 Let’s Connect 

• All links, resources and ways to connect are here https://linktr.ee/GAWellness

🔔 If this episode spoke to you, lovely, please:

• Follow the podcast.
• Leave a quick review (it truly helps!)
• Share with a bestie who’s ready to reclaim wellness on her own terms.

 © 2026 GA Wellness with Georgia Ann™. All content is for educational purposes only and is not medical or psychological advice. 

Transcript

E029 Rest & Repair: Sleeping But Still Tired? What Your Brain Is Doing Overnight
Georgia Ann

Opening

Some nights you fall asleep easily and wake up feeling great. Other nights you wake up in the middle of the night, maybe drift in and out of sleep or wake up feeling foggy in the morning. In this episode, we're unpacking what your brain is doing during those hours overnight and why it moves through sleep cycles and how that can affect whether you feel rested the next day or not.

Podcast Intro

Welcome to the GA Wellness Podcast. Small steps, lasting change. I'm your host, Georgia Ann, health coach, solo mum and a woman who's lived through the chaos, the curveballs and the craving for something steadier. After 20 years in the fitness industry and my own journey through grief, motherhood and starting over, I've learned that real wellness isn't about doing more, it's about doing what matters. Each week, we cut through the noise and get real with simple, doable tools to help you feel stronger, calmer and more like you. This isn't about perfection, it's about steady soul led progress because you deserve wellness that fits into your full life, not just one version of it. Let's dive in.

Welcome Back

Hey, lovely. Welcome back to the GA Wellness Podcast. While I'm recording this, we're at the end of March and still having such beautiful weather here. I love that we can still head to the beach, lay in the sand and really soak up that late summer feeling just a little bit longer. You might have realised by now, but I'm a little bit of a beach bunny and this year my birthday actually falls on Easter Sunday, so I'm really looking forward to some warmish weather over the four day break, hopefully. Seriously, it's the idea of slower relaxing days and just a little bit of sunshine and may even a few nights of better quality sleep and that sounds so good right now. So if you're new to the podcast, a big welcome to you.

Rest and Repair Arc

We're currently in a new conversation about sleep, which is where this rest and repair arc comes from. So this arc is about recognising the factors internally and externally that affect your sleep and in turn how that influences your sleep quality and quantity and there's a difference between the two and we'll unpack that as we move through this arc. Last week we started unpacking why it feels so difficult to switch off at night, even when your body feels tired. I also find this can feel a little bit harder in warmer weather as well and I mean, here in Adelaide, we're almost being affectionately labelled as a city with the Rolls Royce electricity prices.

External Factors and Sleep

Realistically, this adds another layer to where these external factors come from and tell me if you've ever had this, you're laying there thinking, should I put the aircon on? How much is that going to cost me? Can I just get through this for more night? And I mean, that might sound small, but it builds, especially in a heat wave and it becomes part of the environment your body and mind are trying to settle into and these external factors can absolutely shape how easily you fall asleep and how well you stay asleep. So we didn't specifically touch on this in last week's episode, but I think it is quite valid today. In this episode we're going to explore what happens behind the scenes once your eyes close and your body starts getting some time to rest.

What Your Brain Is Doing Overnight

We're going to look at what your brain is doing overnight, how your body moves through different stages of sleep. Also why external factors like temperature, wake ups and disruptions can make such a difference to how rested you feel the next day. So, I've noticed something really interesting in my own sleep habits and patterns. There are some nights where I'm feeling great, I'm literally kicking goals in every aspect of my life. I'm drinking water, staying hydrated and nourishing and I've even started running again, which has been really exciting for me. When all those things line up, I find I tend to fall asleep easily and sometimes those are my favourite nights. Doesn't happen all the time and if you listen to last week's episode, I kind of explained some of the other factors as to why that can happen.

Waking Up and Losing Track of Time

So I find that my alarm will go off in the morning and I'll wake up rather abruptly and think, wait, what is it morning already? It's such a strange feeling sometimes when you think about it, there's been seven or eight hours where you've basically just lost track of time. It feels like your brain has been busy doing something while you weren't actually aware of and it kind of feels like FOMO, but, you know, not really. It's more that curiosity feeling, almost like something important is happened while you're asleep and you just missed the whole thing and this is where it gets really interesting. Your brain is doing quite a lot while you're asleep and once you understand what's happening overnight, this experience starts to make a lot more sense. 

Sleep Cycles

This is one of those scenarios we're going to explore today, your sleep might feel completely different to this and that's exactly why we're going to look at a few different patterns as we go through this episode, but just stay with me for a moment and as we talk about this one. I want you to remember that your brain doesn't actually switch off while you're asleep. It's running differently and it's going through different patterns to what it might be doing during the day while you're awake. Your brain is constantly firing electrical signals between neurons. It's processing your conversations, your decisions and the emotional movement that's happened throughout the day, even the moments you barely notice at the time.

The Overnight Filing Cabinet

Then once you fall asleep, it starts processing it. I kind of think of it like an overnight internal filing cabinet or an electronic filing cabinet, if we're being modern. Okay. So it decides what needs to be stored as memory, what information connects to existing patterns, like things you experienced before, beliefs you already hold, or memories that are already stored there and what it can let go and it does this by moving through different stages of sleep, which is your sleep cycles. So you move through light sleep, deep sleep and then what's called REM sleep. We're going to unpack this a little bit. REM sleep stands for Rapid Eye Movement sleep and this literally means that your eyes are moving rapidly under your eyelids during this stage, which is where the name comes from.

REM Sleep and Dreams

When you stop to think about it, it's actually kind of surreal, isn't it? It's like, okay, so your eyes are moving around while you're asleep and you don't even realise it. During REM sleep, your brain is doing a lot of emotional and cognitive processing. It's making sense of linking experiences together and helping integrate what you've learned and this is where dreams start to appear. So for someone like me, who has a very vivid imagination, this part actually really fascinates me. I've always dreamt a lot. Even when I was younger, I could wake up and remember parts of my dreams really clearly and I mean, this still happens. Now, sometimes this could happen in whole scenes or places and it feels incredibly real and I kid you not, I've even created entire worlds in my dreams. Literally places and things I've never seen before.

Dreams and Imagination

Not in movies, tv, nowhere. I've created them myself and yet they feel incredibly real. Side note, as I was a kid, I thought this was so cool. I actually used to write them down so then I wouldn't forget what I created in my head. When I really sit down and think about it, it probably explains a lot about how my brain works. If you listen to the Grounded and Growing episodes where I spoke about building worlds and arcs in my head, this was probably one of the early signals of that. Okay, so from a scientific perspective, this happens because your brain is pulling pieces from your memories, your emotions, your experiences and your imagination while weaving them together as it processes the day.

Recurring Dreams

It's almost like your brain is revisiting things that happened earlier and trying to organise them now. Before anyone starts analysing their dreams too deeply. The exact content of your dreams doesn't usually map directly to what your brain is processing and there's no direct correlation. Your brain often uses fragments, symbols and a bit of memory while it stores through information and emotions from the day. So in many ways, dreaming is your brain's way of continuing to organise and process experiences you haven’t quite finished sorting through the day and sometimes this doesn't happen a single night either. This is where the idea of recurring dreams comes from and I'm one of the people that have this quite a bit. Recurring dreams are when the same theme, situation or feelings happen again over time.

Why Sleep Matters

From a brain's perspective, this can happen when the mind is still working through something it hasn't fully resolved yet. So during REM sleep, your brain will continue sorting through emotional experiences and memories, so it may revisit similar patterns while processing is still in place and this is also one of the reasons why sleep matters so much. While you're resting, your brain is still working through what is happening, like your emotions and your experiences, so you can actually wake up the next day with more clarity in your day. This brings me back to those mornings where you wake up and think, hold on, what is it? Morning already? It now makes sense when you think about what's happened overnight.

Sleep Quality and Sleep Quantity

Your body's rested, your brain worked through what happened during the day and everything moved through those cycles in the way it was designed to and when that happens, sleep can feel incredibly efficient and this is where the difference between sleep quality and sleep quantity really starts to matter. The hours you sleep matter, yes, but it's also what's happening in those hours and these type of questions like, did your brain get a chance to move through those sleep cycles properly or their sleep stages properly? Did your brain get a chance to do the work that it needed to do overnight? When those things line up, you wake up with that clarity and just with knowing what you need to work through and your thinking feels sharper and your emotions feel more regulated.

Waking Up Groggy

Of course, sleep doesn't always look like this and that's where the next scenario is going to come from and you may notice this in some mornings, there are times where you wake up, but you don't feel fully awake and to me, this feels familiar. You might drift in and out of sleep a couple of times before you actually get up. Your alarm goes off, you open your eyes for a moment, hit snooze for about 10 minutes and then it happens again and it might feel like you've only been asleep for five minutes when it's actually been 30. I cannot tell you how many times this has happened to me and suddenly my planned morning workouts just disappear. This is actually why movement breaks exist, or why I believe so much in movement breaks.

Sleep Mode 

It's a concept I introduced back in the mobility matters arc because I believe that daily life doesn't always line up perfectly with our plans and sometimes our morning routines don’t happen in the way we expect and that's okay. Movement can still happen in smaller pockets across the day, but coming back to sleep for a moment. So in this scenario, that in-between feeling is often because your brain is still moving through one of those sleep cycles and it's not quite finished the stage it was in. So instead of waking up feeling clear and ready to go, your brain is still partially in sleep mode. This is why some mornings you can feel quite groggy and you might just be a bit dizzy or just not really mentally ready to start the day.

Interrupted Sleep Cycles

Your body might technically be awake, but your brain is still catching up because it's moving out of a deeper stage of sleep that it was in and this is also why hitting snooze repeatedly can sometimes make that feeling worse. Every time you drift back into sleep, your brain starts to move back into another sleep cycle. Then the alarm pulls you out again before that cycle has had a chance to finish. So instead of one clean wake up, your brain is being interrupted multiple times while it's still trying to move through its normal rhythm. Now, we're going to talk about this in the next episode of this Rest and Repair arc because the way your sleep cycles interact with your mood, your thinking and your energy, the next day is actually quite fascinating.

Middle of the Night Wake Ups

For today, the main thing to understand is when those sleep cycles get interrupted repeatedly, your brain does not get the chance to complete the work it normally does overnight and this is where the ripple effects can start when showing up the next day. Okay, I'm going to move into another scenario and this one might resonate with you quite strongly. I have definitely done this to myself. I don't know how many times before. I've gone through the whole day, been really busy and then at night I'll suddenly think to myself, oh, I didn't drink enough water today and then I'll have a few glasses before going to bed to make up for it. Can you guess where this is going? The constant getting up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet.

Remembering Dreams

Now here is something really interesting I've noticed about those nights. They are often the nights where I actually remember the most dreams and they can feel incredibly vivid. It's almost like you're dreaming more than usual. What is actually happening is that you're waking up during or just after a different dreaming stage and you remember it. When we sleep through the night without waking, many of those dreams simply just fade into memory. Interrupted sleep can affect the quality of your sleep. Those awakenings break the natural flow of your cycles. Your brain is still moving through those stages in a rhythm across the night and then when you keep waking up, that rhythm gets disrupted and your brain has to work a little harder to get back to sleep again. Tell me if this feels familiar as well.

Phone Notifications at Night

Your phone is not on ‘night mode’ or ‘do not disturb’ and you come back from the toilet and suddenly there is the message notification or something from Facebook or Instagram and before you know it, you are checking it. At that point, your brain has fully registered that you're awake and once this happens, it can take a lot longer to fall back to sleep, which can start affecting both the quality and the quantity of your sleep. Okay and I just want to spend a second here and normalise this for a moment. So we've just been listening to three different examples of what sleep can look like and the reality is they often do depend on what is happening in your world at the time and that is completely normal and we're not going to always have the perfect sleep every single night.

Deep Sleep and Light Sleep

To be honest, the longer stretches of sleep I've been having lately are actually quite rare. Before having Ellie, I could sleep through the night without a problem. Now sometimes I feel like I sleep with one eye open just in case and if you're a parent listening to this, you might know exactly what I mean. Your brain actually becomes more responsive to certain sounds after you have a child, particularly your own child's voice or cry. Even while you're asleep, your brain is still tuned on to those signals. So it's not unusual for parents to feel that they become lighter sleepers over time, even though they might have originally become deeper sleepers. I'm going to go through what this means. A deep sleeper is someone whose brain tends to stay in deeper stages of sleep for longer periods.

It often takes more noise or disruption to wake them up and when they do wake up, they may take a little longer to fully fall back asleep and just a bit of a side note here, before having Ellie I can remember because in Adelaide we don't have many earthquakes. We have had a couple, but we don't have a lot and I remember everyone talking about it one night and saying,  oh, did you feel the earthquake? And I'm like, no, I kind of slept through it. So a light sleeper is someone whose brain stays closer to the lighter stages of sleep, so they tend to wake more easily from sounds, movement, or changes in their environment.

Their brain is simply more responsive to those signals during the night, which means that they may wake up more often if nothing major has happened. Now, interestingly, being a deep sleeper does not automatically mean someone has better sleep and being a lighter sleeper does not automatically mean someone sleeps poorly. What really matters here is whether your brain is able to move through the sleep cycles across the night, which is light, deep, or REM and complete the work that it needs to do overnight. This is what tends to make sleep feel more restorative the next day. So really, the goal isn't perfect sleep every night. It's giving your brain the chance to move through those cycles as smoothly as possible. Okay, so we've just spoken about the different ways sleep can show up.

Seasons of Life and Sleep

We've looked at sleep cycles and how waking during certain stages can affect how you feel the next day and how different scenarios can interrupt to that natural rhythm. The other thing I want to acknowledge here is that sleep can also change. Depending on the season of life you're in. There will be times where sleep flows quite easily. You fall asleep, stay asleep and wake up feeling great. Then there are other seasons where things like stress, parenting, work, or big life changes can start affecting how your brain moves through those sleep cycles. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that I talk about seasons quite a lot because our bodies and nervous system are always responding to what's happening in our world.

Season Mapping Quiz

So instead of expecting sleep to look the same all the time, it can be much helpful to understand what season you might be in right now and that's exactly why I created the Season Mapping Quiz. It's designed to help you get a little bit more clarity around the season you're currently moving through and what your brain and body might be needing at this particular point in time. If you're curious about that, you can find the quiz through the link in the show notes. 

Small Things That Can Help

Now, before we finish off today, I want to share a few things that can help your brain move through those sleep cycles a little bit more smoothly. One of the biggest ones is charging your phone in another room. You might be surprised how much this one small thing can change and how much it can help. When your phone is next to your bed, it becomes very easy to check a message, scroll something quickly, or respond to a notification. If you wake up during the night, moving it out of the room removes the temptation completely. Another small thing is to think about how much water you're drinking right before bed. Yes, hydration during the day is really important, but drinking several glasses of water before night can lead up to so many of those middle of the night wake ups and if you tend to wake up thirsty, having maybe a small glass next to your bed can also help without disrupting your sleep too much. 

Screens Before Bedtime

Finally, try to minimise screens before bedtime and this also comes back to what I was talking about in last week's episode about getting your mind to rest before going to sleep. Screens are definitely something that can be a bit of a culprit when it comes to this, especially because what screens can do is they can really ignite our brain. So by putting them away and giving yourself a bit of time before bed can actually help with that. 

Full Circle Summary

Okay, so as we wrap up today, let's bring this full circle. In this episode, we talked about what your brain is doing while you're asleep. We talked about the different sleep cycles your brain moves through overnight, how waking up during those sleep cycles can affect how you feel the next morning and how things like notifications, getting up during the night, or environmental changes can disrupt those patterns. When you look at it this way, the hours overnight are actually quite active for your brain and they're so important.

Your body is resting, but your brain is working through what has happened during the day. It's sorting experiences, processing emotions and organising information so things are easier to make sense of the next day and you get a little bit more clarity. Next week we're going to bring this into your day to day life and we're going to talk a little bit more about the after effects of what happens, depending on what kind of sleep you've had. So over the next few days, start noticing how your own sleep patterns work and pay attention to how you feel when you wake up and how your nights have been. Those small observations can tell you a lot about what your body and what your brain might be needing right now. So until next week, take care of yourself. Sweet dreams and I'm so glad you're here.

Outro

Thanks for being here. Lovely. If today's episode gave you a light bulb moment, helped you feel seen or sparked a small step, I'd love to hear about it.

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Until next time, take a deep breath and take care of you.

With love,

Georgia Ann

© 2026 GA Wellness with Georgia Ann™.

All content is for educational purposes only and is not medical or psychological advice.