Why Everything Hurts in the Morning, According to Science
ou know the feeling: You fall asleep feeling fine—good, even—and wake up with the sense that it’ll take a crane to get you out of bed. Everything hurts in the morning, and it’s not just because you slept in a wonky position or on a lousy pillow.
Turns out, our bodies seem to suppress inflammation when we sleep, leading to worse pain when we wake up and the inflammation is, so to speak, turned back “on,” according to a new University of Manchester study published in the journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.
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In darkness, those inflammatory markers decreased. “At nighttime, those inflammatory markers go down but gradually rise up again in the morning,” says University of Manchester researcher and study author Julie Gibbs, PhD. She cautions that this particular study didn’t examine pain, but if you were to assume that with greater inflammation comes more pain, “you would expect more inflammation in the joints and increased pain levels in the morning,” she says.
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And if you tend to go on early morning rides, give yourself a little more time to warm up, or consider switching to lunch rides instead.