Some non-LD-related questions

Wow, I stumbled upon this site through a link from howstuffworks.com's article on sleep. I'm gonna give LD a try, sounds like a lot of fun...

...but until then, I had a few other questions which you guys could probably answer easily, relating to sleep in general. It's mostly about being able to wake up in the morning, and such...

I find that there are times where, even though I get a reasonable amount of sleep, I just have trouble getting up in the morning... Like, I'll wake up, but when I get up, I'll feel really tired (and somewhat dizzy)... and I know I've gotten all the sleep I need (like 8 hours). Am I having these problems because I'm waking up in the wrong sleep stage? Since my odds of being in REM sleep in the morning are pretty high, shouldn't I have an EASIER time getting up? Am I somehow nailing the delta stage with my alarm clock or something?

Anyway, other than "getting the right amount of sleep," what are ways to quickly get over the initial drowsiness? Once I get up, walk around a bit or whatever, I start feeling better, but it's so hard to get that extra motivation early in the day sometimes, and I just go back to bed to... er... relax my eyeballs a bit (and then end up sleeping in). Should I just set my alarm clock a little later, to slip into a more favourable sleep stage?

My second question is the following: Someone told me (a long time ago, but it's interesting) that to get the most out of a good night's sleep, the earlier you go to bed, the better (assuming you sleep the same amount of time). That is, going to bed at 9pm and getting up at 6am is "better" than say going to bed at 11pm and getting up at 8am. Is there any truth to this? There was something about the time between 8 and midnight being the most effective part of your sleep. I think it's rubbish, since I assume the most "relaxation" your body gets comes from the deep, stage 4 sleep, which occurs in the early part of the night, whenever you decide to hit the hay...

*whew* hope that made sense. Cheers!

Yeah, it's true about going to sleep earlier. Your body has its own time clock in the Pons (part of the brain that controls the sleep-wake cycle), and it generally knows what time it is. Before midnight-2AM is the time that the body regenerates most of its cells and can be considered "healing time" so it's much more important to go to sleep earlier than to get extra sleep by sleeping in. This info is off the top of my head, but I heard it pretty recently in a health report, so I don't know if I got the info down right.

Here's something funny: My body has an incredibly accurate time clock. I don't know if it happens to anyone else, but I always wake up exactly one minute before my alarm clock goes off. I hate the sound of the beeping in the morning, so I've made it a habit of turning it off right before it goes off. It doesn't matter when I go to bed; as long as Im rested enough to be able to wake up, I find myself doing this. Just wondering - does this happen others?