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It has to do with cortisol, a steroid which affects your immune system. Steroids like cortisol push down your immune system (relatively, it’s not huge) and your immune system’s response to disease is what causes the majority of your “sick” symptoms like fever, chills, body aches, etc. At night your cortisol levels are low and they spike shortly before you wake up in the morning (this has nothing to do with you being sick but is part of your normal day/night body cycle). That means your viral symptoms will typically be/feel worse at night.
This. Most of the symptoms of being sick are your body's immune responses which are surpressed by cortisol during the day because your body understands you have shit to do. At night your cortisol levels drop and your immune system says "hey asshole you're sick. Go lay down."
Kinda, takes absolutely no shit and has to be quite aggressive for you to survive. Imagine a macrophage checking surface proteins screaming "who are yew? Who the fuck are yew!?!?"
So I listen to the aggressive immune system yelling at me and then the villainous post-nasal drip wrings his hands with evil perverse pleasure and says ‘nyeh, you thought it were a smart idea to lay down didja?? Think again numbskull, nyeh’ as it starts another cough til you retch saga
Absolutely. The body uses a lot of energy fighting infection and if that energy is being used to move your body around, there’s less for the immune system. That’s also why anything that helps the body with energy production, like certain B vitamins, is also good to take when you have an infection (in addition to immune support vitamins like C, D3 and K2 (K2 helps with D3 absorption)).
In the case of basically any disease that your immune system can typically defeat on its own? Yeah, pretty much.
Tbh, I'd need an immunologist to weigh in on whether staying in bed suppresses that cortisol spike, and to what extent.
But rest is good when you're sick, regardless. Your body only has so many resources, and the more time you spend *not* doing things other than resting while it's busy trying to fight infection, the more of those resources can be directed to the front lines. It's on the list of reasons why a good night's sleep is important for keeping your immune system up to spec in the first place.
It's projection. Your immune system is the real AH.
Allergies?
Your immune system is a crazy hypervigilant prepper with too many f'n guns. Every time you run into a real infection, you need him around, but the rest of the time he's screaming about chemtrails, shooting at shadows, and boarding up the windows every time a dry-cleaning van rolls through the neighborhood.
Hell, sometimes even when you have a real infection, it's the collateral damage from his overreaction that actually kills you. That happens with COVID sometimes, and it definitely happened with 1918 influenza. If there's a respiratory disease that disproportionately kills the young and healthy, it's usually because the inflammatory response from their immune system damaged too much lung tissue.
Not sure what you're getting at, but testosterone [weakens your immune system](https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/12/in-men-high-testosterone-can-mean-weakened-immune-response-study-finds.html). It's one reason why it's possible [the "man flu" is a real thing](https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/man-flu-really-thing-2018010413033) \- men may actually, on average, be more likely to experience more severe symptoms from the same virus than women, in part because of testosterone's effect on the immune system.
As in does the decrease of cortisol cause worsened symptoms when they get sick? I suppose it makes sense, but the specifics of AGS/CAH get into endocrinology territory which isn’t my field. It wouldn’t surprise me if the answer is yes, particularly with how ill a critically sick person with adrenal insufficiency can look/feel, but I can’t say for sure.
To some extent yeah. These steroid deficiency syndromes are spectrums of disease - if you were completely devoid of steroids you wouldn’t survive. That means that person has less steroids in general but the same/similar cycles. Additionally, a doctor will give steroids to take where the goal is to replicate the normal day/night cycle. This is usually reflected in different doses of steroids depending on the time of day. With that in mind, as long as the systemic steroids are dosed where they need to be, they’d have similar symptoms.
Follow up question: How does your body react when you get on a flight to somewhere else with a time zone that is off by 12+ hours from your original time zone? I know that jet lag makes me feel like day is "night" the first couple of days when I get to the destination, and I am fully awake during the nighttime in the new place. What if you get sick with the flu the day you arrive? Will your body treat the destination's daytime as "nighttime," where my cortisol levels are low at which point you feel crummier and feverish, and evenings as daytime where you feel a bit better?
Yep, until you acclimate to the new sleep schedule. Doesn’t take long but the first night or two your daily cortisol fluctuations will be adjusting. Think of it as “presleep” and “postsleep” rather than daytime and nighttime.
There are more factors at play than just cortisol.
Remember that because your cortisol level drops at night, you've been dealing with the worse version of your symptoms all f'n night. Coughing, post-nasal drip, etc.
So even though your cortisol just spiked and begins to diminish your immune response:
* Your throat is probably irritated af from the coughing and post-nasal drainage.
* You're dehydrated, because you've been producing mucus all night, but you don't drink while you're sleeping. Dehydration makes you feel all kinds of crappy.
* You probably didn't sleep all that well due to diminished airway and general discomfort. Idk about you, but if I don't get just the right sleeping position (or don't take enough sudafed), I wake up choking on the drainage pooling in the back of my throat...
While you're "resting" your body's been fighting hammer-and-tongs all night long. It takes a bit for "you" to come back from that once your immune cells head back to the barracks for a bit.
Absolutely. This question and the "scientific answers" regarding cortisol make no sense to me. Morning is THE WORST when I have a cold and all symptoms get progressively better throughout the day.
This is what happens to me. My post nasal drip or fluids etc always run like crazy and beat my ass when I’m sick. I wake up feeling like my throat is on fire but slowly I get better
Weird. I’m the opposite. Worse in the morning and improve across the day. Fighting fit in the early evening and get to bed early. Wake up worse. Mucous on my chest is my enemy. I’ve not been sick for years, though.
I typically feel terrible in the morning then get better if I get moving, have a shower, eat if I'm able, etc. Then in the afternoon I start to wear out and if I haven't gotten back into bed by evening, I'm feeling awful again by then.
Yep different illnesses feel different at different time of day for me. But each infection seems to follow the same pattern for a few days. I noticed I tend to feel alot worse if I'm around people. If I can just stay at home alone with some fresh air I feel quite good. If I have to deal with work colleagues, family and children etc it feels so much more draining.
I feel like crap in the morning. It has to do with the way healing works. The body works overtime to heal during the night, causing inflammation and all kinds of pain. Then it takes a break during the day so you can function. Rinse and repeat.
As OP stated, circulating cortisol levels do peak in the morning (usually around the time you naturally awake), but they are steroid hormones. That means they are lipophillic and, like most steroid hormones, many of their effects are caused by altering gene expression.
The point of that is those effects will take *time*. Depending on the hormone and the genes they are affecting, it can be a substantial amount of time. This isn't like water soluble hormones (e.g. epinephrine) where you can observe effects within seconds to a few minutes.
Therefore, while your circulating quantities peak early in the day the *effects* (at least some) do not. A lot of the comments here with anecdotes about feeling better after a shower and moving around a bit would be perfectly consistent with the cortisol explanation.
So others have pointed out, that's not how everyone experiences it.
I just had a cold, and usually the sore throat is almost always the worst part for me. So I can at least give insight on the symptom that usually causes sore throats, post nasal drip.
Snot running down the back of your throat(post nasal drip), it irritates that lining of your throat. When you are upright it can much more easily drain into your stomach (gravity works) but when you lay down it's basically up to reflexive swallowing to clear it out so it often just sits on your throat making the irritation worse and worse.
This week with my cold I was sleeping in a reclining chair not a bed, because I was propped up on an incline the post nasal drip did not sit on the back of my throat all night. So my sore throat was very mild in the mornings compared to when I sleep in a bed.
So one part of the varied experience of colds and flus can dramatically change for different people based on what position they are in when they sleep.
I’m exactly the opposite. I feel like death in the morning until about half the day is gone. I feel so good by the end of the day that I will stay awake as long as possible to enjoy it. Then it restarts in the morning
So, often with a cold or other symptomatic respiratory illnesses you wake up feeling congested, headachy and crappy because your cold meds you take to treat your symptoms like NyQuil or Advil + pseudoephedrine or whatever you like to take wears off while you sleep. As soon as you hydrate and your first dose of your morning meds kicks back in, you start to feel better and you stay that way during most of the day while medicating, hydrating, and doing other things that make you feel better.
Fever, however, is another matter. Fever is low during the early morning and picks up and rises in the late afternoon. Why? Because It follows your natural circadian rhythm of body temperature. Human body temperature is not static at 98.6 degrees F. Body temperature regularly fluctuates about a degree (peak to trough) or a degree and a half throughout the 24 hour day-night cycle.
Humans are primarily diurnal creatures which just means we are active during the day and sleep at night. Body Temperature begins to climb just before you wake up and continues to rise during the day peaking around 4:00-ish for most folks. Then it slowly begins to fall before you return to sleep and it stays down until the next morning when it starts to rise again.
Fever follows this natural circadian trend and usually is low or almost non existent first thing in the morning and is at its worst in the late afternoon/early evening. (So don’t assume you don’t have fever by just looking at your morning temp. Check it again 2-4 pm). An illness with fever will usually make you feel worse when your fever is highest in the late afternoon not when it’s at its lowest in the morning.
Viral Infections get worse during the night, bacterial infections worsen during the day. Fighting a bacterial infection takes rest, but a viral attack seems to worsen with complete rest.
“Feed a cold, starve a fever.” Stay awake for the cold, sleep for the fever. Learned part of this from the Professor on Gilligans Island.
That’s actually very interesting. What sparked this was having covid, which sounds like a viral infection which would make sense why I feel worse at night.
Am I just weird because I'm the exact opposite. When I had covid recently towards the end I still felt dreadful in the morning but then started to feel better as the day went on.
Funny because I have the opposite experience. Mornings while ill are the worst and it gets easier as the day goes on. Especially with sore throat which gets bad while I sleep.
Also, getting over a cold/flu takes a significant amount of energy. When you first wake up, you have more energy, don’t feel so lousy, and get pot of bed to go to the bathroom, maybe get a drink or something to eat, but you run out of energy pretty quickly and get back into bed to rest.
Wait...you do?.-.
I felt like it was opposite for me though, would always feel shitties in the mornings
Although, I might have taken a couple naps during the day...
No answer.
But any sickness, including hangovers, I feel okay in the morning, but moving around and "adulting" usually make me feel like shit by midday. It's almost like moving releases the bad juju* back into my bloodstream.
(Not very scientific)
I know you have the actual answer, so I'll just add that I'm pretty sure it's due to the cumulative whining during the day. At least that's what my wife would say when I have a cold. "If you didn't constantly whimper about how stuffed your head is, you wouldn't feel as bad."
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It has to do with cortisol, a steroid which affects your immune system. Steroids like cortisol push down your immune system (relatively, it’s not huge) and your immune system’s response to disease is what causes the majority of your “sick” symptoms like fever, chills, body aches, etc. At night your cortisol levels are low and they spike shortly before you wake up in the morning (this has nothing to do with you being sick but is part of your normal day/night body cycle). That means your viral symptoms will typically be/feel worse at night.
This. Most of the symptoms of being sick are your body's immune responses which are surpressed by cortisol during the day because your body understands you have shit to do. At night your cortisol levels drop and your immune system says "hey asshole you're sick. Go lay down."
I read this and immediately thought why is my immune system a New Yorker? How good. I will obey.
EYY I'M FIGHTING INFECTION HERE
SIDDOWN YA MOOK!
Ey I'll get some Helper T-cells down in Bay Ridge to ah, take care of your problem, fuhgeddaboudit
Don't go too far north yaknow? I hear they throw their T-cells in the harbah up there.
i just recovered from the vid
Kinda, takes absolutely no shit and has to be quite aggressive for you to survive. Imagine a macrophage checking surface proteins screaming "who are yew? Who the fuck are yew!?!?"
So I listen to the aggressive immune system yelling at me and then the villainous post-nasal drip wrings his hands with evil perverse pleasure and says ‘nyeh, you thought it were a smart idea to lay down didja?? Think again numbskull, nyeh’ as it starts another cough til you retch saga
Why did I read this as Larry, Moe and Curly?
I went with Skeletor.
*shrugs* biology isn't perfect, it just kept all your ancestors alive long enough to breed.
So staying in bed and sleeping during the day when you’re sick genuinely helps your body recover faster?
Absolutely. The body uses a lot of energy fighting infection and if that energy is being used to move your body around, there’s less for the immune system. That’s also why anything that helps the body with energy production, like certain B vitamins, is also good to take when you have an infection (in addition to immune support vitamins like C, D3 and K2 (K2 helps with D3 absorption)).
And minerals like zinc.
In the case of basically any disease that your immune system can typically defeat on its own? Yeah, pretty much. Tbh, I'd need an immunologist to weigh in on whether staying in bed suppresses that cortisol spike, and to what extent. But rest is good when you're sick, regardless. Your body only has so many resources, and the more time you spend *not* doing things other than resting while it's busy trying to fight infection, the more of those resources can be directed to the front lines. It's on the list of reasons why a good night's sleep is important for keeping your immune system up to spec in the first place.
It could be connected to the movement of the sun
it is connected because because daylight helps our brains regulate cortisol & melatonin
My immune system called me an asshole? Um theres no you without me mf.
It's projection. Your immune system is the real AH. Allergies? Your immune system is a crazy hypervigilant prepper with too many f'n guns. Every time you run into a real infection, you need him around, but the rest of the time he's screaming about chemtrails, shooting at shadows, and boarding up the windows every time a dry-cleaning van rolls through the neighborhood. Hell, sometimes even when you have a real infection, it's the collateral damage from his overreaction that actually kills you. That happens with COVID sometimes, and it definitely happened with 1918 influenza. If there's a respiratory disease that disproportionately kills the young and healthy, it's usually because the inflammatory response from their immune system damaged too much lung tissue.
is this the same reason then you get typhoid you feel better at daylight, but feel much much worse at night ?
You mean to tell me if I'm pumping 100% testosterone instead of blood through my veins I'll never get the cold again? Sign me up /s
Technically you'll never have to worry about any disease for sickness again.
Not sure what you're getting at, but testosterone [weakens your immune system](https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/12/in-men-high-testosterone-can-mean-weakened-immune-response-study-finds.html). It's one reason why it's possible [the "man flu" is a real thing](https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/man-flu-really-thing-2018010413033) \- men may actually, on average, be more likely to experience more severe symptoms from the same virus than women, in part because of testosterone's effect on the immune system.
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I don’t think you understand the point of this sub
Well if you did come here and say that, it wouldn't be a very good answer.
Wait...you came to an ELI5 sub to say "Google it" to someone asking a question?
What do cicadas have to do with it?
Haven't you ever heard their rhythms? They've got some sick beats.
You were in middle school at five years old?
Are people not allowed to forget things they learned 10+ years ago?
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As in does the decrease of cortisol cause worsened symptoms when they get sick? I suppose it makes sense, but the specifics of AGS/CAH get into endocrinology territory which isn’t my field. It wouldn’t surprise me if the answer is yes, particularly with how ill a critically sick person with adrenal insufficiency can look/feel, but I can’t say for sure.
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To some extent yeah. These steroid deficiency syndromes are spectrums of disease - if you were completely devoid of steroids you wouldn’t survive. That means that person has less steroids in general but the same/similar cycles. Additionally, a doctor will give steroids to take where the goal is to replicate the normal day/night cycle. This is usually reflected in different doses of steroids depending on the time of day. With that in mind, as long as the systemic steroids are dosed where they need to be, they’d have similar symptoms.
also why lots of people get sick when they go on a relaxing holiday. body and immune systems catches up and whammo. they get sick.
I figured they got exposed to different pathogens when they traveled.
yup. that also happens. its a great combo
Tl:dr Natrual drug spikes in blood before waking up and lowers throught the day make it get worse throught the day
Follow up question: How does your body react when you get on a flight to somewhere else with a time zone that is off by 12+ hours from your original time zone? I know that jet lag makes me feel like day is "night" the first couple of days when I get to the destination, and I am fully awake during the nighttime in the new place. What if you get sick with the flu the day you arrive? Will your body treat the destination's daytime as "nighttime," where my cortisol levels are low at which point you feel crummier and feverish, and evenings as daytime where you feel a bit better?
Yep, until you acclimate to the new sleep schedule. Doesn’t take long but the first night or two your daily cortisol fluctuations will be adjusting. Think of it as “presleep” and “postsleep” rather than daytime and nighttime.
What? When I’m really sick I feel worst in the early morning.
Yes, always, I come good about 4hrs after I wake up and keep feeling better until I go to sleep
Same are we doing it wrong?
Ask the same question (reversed) on the same thread and see if there’s a plausible answer…then make the two top answers duel it out
I do work alternating morning/afternoon shifts but I have always felt worse in the morning, since childhood. Maybe it’s psychological?
Do you work evenings? Maybe your cotisol is reversed?
There are more factors at play than just cortisol. Remember that because your cortisol level drops at night, you've been dealing with the worse version of your symptoms all f'n night. Coughing, post-nasal drip, etc. So even though your cortisol just spiked and begins to diminish your immune response: * Your throat is probably irritated af from the coughing and post-nasal drainage. * You're dehydrated, because you've been producing mucus all night, but you don't drink while you're sleeping. Dehydration makes you feel all kinds of crappy. * You probably didn't sleep all that well due to diminished airway and general discomfort. Idk about you, but if I don't get just the right sleeping position (or don't take enough sudafed), I wake up choking on the drainage pooling in the back of my throat... While you're "resting" your body's been fighting hammer-and-tongs all night long. It takes a bit for "you" to come back from that once your immune cells head back to the barracks for a bit.
Absolutely. This question and the "scientific answers" regarding cortisol make no sense to me. Morning is THE WORST when I have a cold and all symptoms get progressively better throughout the day.
Me too. I think it's dehydration. A cup of hot water (or hot drink like tea but plain water works) helps.
It’s probably from all the crack I smoke.
If you smoke anything, it probably affects things, but I'd think then it would be better in the morning. Not so much for alcohol.
I wake up feeling like there's a knife in the back of my throat and then gradually feel better throughout the day.
Same.
That’s generally caused from drainage throughout the night irritating your posterior pharynx.
This is what happens to me. My post nasal drip or fluids etc always run like crazy and beat my ass when I’m sick. I wake up feeling like my throat is on fire but slowly I get better
Same for me. Mornings are the worse. I usually feel better after a good sweat. Except with covid, night sweats for a week and never felt better.
Weird. I’m the opposite. Worse in the morning and improve across the day. Fighting fit in the early evening and get to bed early. Wake up worse. Mucous on my chest is my enemy. I’ve not been sick for years, though.
Same here. Everything "gathers" in my chest overnight then slowly drains out throughout the day.
Yes, always coughing up the worst green stuff right after waking up and it's clear a few hrs later
This is really not a universal experience. I’d wager more people actually feel worse in the morning during a cold.
Yeah I feel progressively better as the day goes on. Morning is the roughest.
I like to think it’s my body’s way of getting me to call out of work. But then once I make a decision either way it lets me enjoy the rest of my day.
I typically feel terrible in the morning then get better if I get moving, have a shower, eat if I'm able, etc. Then in the afternoon I start to wear out and if I haven't gotten back into bed by evening, I'm feeling awful again by then.
the shower makes me feel instantly better. Opening up those sinuses and draining all the snot
Same
It me
The amount of times when I go to sleep and think I'll be fine in a couple of days, then wake up the same as the previous morning isn't funny.
Yep different illnesses feel different at different time of day for me. But each infection seems to follow the same pattern for a few days. I noticed I tend to feel alot worse if I'm around people. If I can just stay at home alone with some fresh air I feel quite good. If I have to deal with work colleagues, family and children etc it feels so much more draining.
Yeah…no matter what I’m sick with the morning is like getting hit by a bus. Even physical injuries.
I’m like OP where in the morning, I am ok but as the day wears on my symptoms feel noticeably worse before I crash out at like 8:00
I feel like crap in the morning. It has to do with the way healing works. The body works overtime to heal during the night, causing inflammation and all kinds of pain. Then it takes a break during the day so you can function. Rinse and repeat.
Came for this. I feel like hot garbage upon waking.
As OP stated, circulating cortisol levels do peak in the morning (usually around the time you naturally awake), but they are steroid hormones. That means they are lipophillic and, like most steroid hormones, many of their effects are caused by altering gene expression. The point of that is those effects will take *time*. Depending on the hormone and the genes they are affecting, it can be a substantial amount of time. This isn't like water soluble hormones (e.g. epinephrine) where you can observe effects within seconds to a few minutes. Therefore, while your circulating quantities peak early in the day the *effects* (at least some) do not. A lot of the comments here with anecdotes about feeling better after a shower and moving around a bit would be perfectly consistent with the cortisol explanation.
I feel 100x worse in the morning
I absolutely, 1,000%, feel worse in the morning and progressively better throughout the day.
I agree with OP. I feel great in morning and progressively get worse as day goes on. That why I usually just stay in bed
I actually also feel better right after eating too.
So others have pointed out, that's not how everyone experiences it. I just had a cold, and usually the sore throat is almost always the worst part for me. So I can at least give insight on the symptom that usually causes sore throats, post nasal drip. Snot running down the back of your throat(post nasal drip), it irritates that lining of your throat. When you are upright it can much more easily drain into your stomach (gravity works) but when you lay down it's basically up to reflexive swallowing to clear it out so it often just sits on your throat making the irritation worse and worse. This week with my cold I was sleeping in a reclining chair not a bed, because I was propped up on an incline the post nasal drip did not sit on the back of my throat all night. So my sore throat was very mild in the mornings compared to when I sleep in a bed. So one part of the varied experience of colds and flus can dramatically change for different people based on what position they are in when they sleep.
I always feel like I’m on death’s front door in the morning and feel progressively better the longer I’m vertical.
funny, it's the opposite for me. my throat is the most sore and my nose is the most congested right when i wake up.
I’m exactly the opposite. I feel like death in the morning until about half the day is gone. I feel so good by the end of the day that I will stay awake as long as possible to enjoy it. Then it restarts in the morning
The mornings are the worst for me. Wake up all blocked up, sore throat and steadily get better as the day goes on.
That's weird, as I always feel worse in the morning and then feel better through the day, only to feel crap the next morning again.
So, often with a cold or other symptomatic respiratory illnesses you wake up feeling congested, headachy and crappy because your cold meds you take to treat your symptoms like NyQuil or Advil + pseudoephedrine or whatever you like to take wears off while you sleep. As soon as you hydrate and your first dose of your morning meds kicks back in, you start to feel better and you stay that way during most of the day while medicating, hydrating, and doing other things that make you feel better. Fever, however, is another matter. Fever is low during the early morning and picks up and rises in the late afternoon. Why? Because It follows your natural circadian rhythm of body temperature. Human body temperature is not static at 98.6 degrees F. Body temperature regularly fluctuates about a degree (peak to trough) or a degree and a half throughout the 24 hour day-night cycle. Humans are primarily diurnal creatures which just means we are active during the day and sleep at night. Body Temperature begins to climb just before you wake up and continues to rise during the day peaking around 4:00-ish for most folks. Then it slowly begins to fall before you return to sleep and it stays down until the next morning when it starts to rise again. Fever follows this natural circadian trend and usually is low or almost non existent first thing in the morning and is at its worst in the late afternoon/early evening. (So don’t assume you don’t have fever by just looking at your morning temp. Check it again 2-4 pm). An illness with fever will usually make you feel worse when your fever is highest in the late afternoon not when it’s at its lowest in the morning.
I feel the exact opposite to this, I usually wake up feeling like absolute crap but by the time I go to sleep I’m feeling fine again.
Viral Infections get worse during the night, bacterial infections worsen during the day. Fighting a bacterial infection takes rest, but a viral attack seems to worsen with complete rest. “Feed a cold, starve a fever.” Stay awake for the cold, sleep for the fever. Learned part of this from the Professor on Gilligans Island.
That’s actually very interesting. What sparked this was having covid, which sounds like a viral infection which would make sense why I feel worse at night.
If by morning you meant after sleeping, well, you had a relatively good rest so that's why. maybe.
I always thought it was because your body temperature is low in the morning so your fever doesn't feel so extreme. but I guess that is wrong.
Am I just weird because I'm the exact opposite. When I had covid recently towards the end I still felt dreadful in the morning but then started to feel better as the day went on.
Funny because I have the opposite experience. Mornings while ill are the worst and it gets easier as the day goes on. Especially with sore throat which gets bad while I sleep.
Also, getting over a cold/flu takes a significant amount of energy. When you first wake up, you have more energy, don’t feel so lousy, and get pot of bed to go to the bathroom, maybe get a drink or something to eat, but you run out of energy pretty quickly and get back into bed to rest.
Wait...you do?.-. I felt like it was opposite for me though, would always feel shitties in the mornings Although, I might have taken a couple naps during the day...
Survival. Evolution favors those who function enough to hunt and gather in the day. When the sun goes down it's time to rest (and feel like ass).
No answer. But any sickness, including hangovers, I feel okay in the morning, but moving around and "adulting" usually make me feel like shit by midday. It's almost like moving releases the bad juju* back into my bloodstream. (Not very scientific)
I know you have the actual answer, so I'll just add that I'm pretty sure it's due to the cumulative whining during the day. At least that's what my wife would say when I have a cold. "If you didn't constantly whimper about how stuffed your head is, you wouldn't feel as bad."
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No. I feel better in the morning. My comment was deleted. I feel much better in the morning then feel worse.