お粥を食べたので、もう寝るつもりです

Question

Context:

今日は夕方から体調が悪くて、吐き気がありました。仕事が終わってからお粥を食べたので、もう寝るつもりです。

I fell it is a little weird that if I translate "ので" to "because", as:
"After the work is finished, because I had some o-kayu, I'm going to bed."
(I suppose "から" mean "after/then" here, but not "cause".)

Is there a better way to translate "ので" explicitly?

And someone gave me a idea that 'ので' shows not only reason/cause but also grounds/motif.
(I have tried to distinguish "reason/cause" from "grounds/motif", but nothing has worked.)

Does "ので" should mean "grounds/motif", but not "because" in this context?

Answer 1

I see the use of ので here as implying that the first event has some effect on the second event. The underlying relation could be

• the speaker thinks that eating is the only thing left to do before sleeping (Note that it's 食べた and 寝る - there is a strict temporal order, and the present is between the two.)
• the speaker thinks that being not hungry makes it easier to sleep

Answer 2

As I'm no Japanese linguist, I think it's better to just think of ので as a formal way of saying から. Makes life easier for me.