I think it’s important to know your personal context levels.

You noticed it because it’s happened to you occasionally. What about people who’ve been experiencing it most of their lives? To them, they are just tired all the time and don’t know why. It could be any number of things.

To someone who’s never experienced it, how could they understand?

My wife has bad sleep apnea and has to use a CPAP - neither of us noticed or understood the issue until she did a sleep study to deal with her bad snoring. We knew she was tired all the time, but attributed it to factors like work stress or maybe diet.

The average person’s understanding of sleep apnea is probably around the level of “it exists and they have to wear a device at night” and not much more.

I guess. This is a good answer, it did made me recontextualize.

Maybe it was always that much obvious to me that what should have been a good night of sleep had no, or maybe even a negative, effect on my wellbeing, and therefore something must be wrong during the sleep.

But if the effects are a bit more muted and accumulate more gradually, and you've never heard much about sleep apnea, you might not directly attribute it to the sleep itself.