Falling asleep is easy, usually within ten minutes. Then almost every night I am fully awake somewhere between 3 and 3:30, not anxious exactly, just completely alert. I lie there, eventually start thinking about work, and get back under around 4:45. Bed at 11, up at 7. No caffeine after midday, room is dark and about 19C. This has been going on for three months.
Two boring things that helped me more than anything clever: eating dinner earlier, and cutting alcohol on weeknights. A drink at 9pm reliably woke me around 3 — it gets you to sleep fast and then the rebound arrives a few hours later. I did not believe it until I tracked it for a fortnight and the pattern was embarrassing.
I have two or three drinks a week and had not connected them at all. Going to track it.
The "then I start thinking about work" part is doing more work in this story than it looks. I keep a notepad by the bed and write the thought down in one line, no elaboration. It sounds like a productivity gimmick and it is not — it just stops the loop of rehearsing something so you do not forget it.
Pen and paper specifically. The moment it becomes a phone note you have a bright screen and an inbox in your hand.
19C is good. Check what the room is doing at 3am though, rather than at bedtime. If your heating comes on early, or summer sun starts warming the room, the temperature you fall asleep in is not the temperature you wake in. Mine was climbing four degrees overnight because of a timer I had forgotten about.
Morning light did it for me. Fifteen minutes outside within half an hour of waking, every day including weekends. Took about ten days to notice anything. It does not stop the waking directly, it seems to make the whole night sit in a more consistent place.
@stealth_park_stu · 3mo ago · 3 replies
The thing that broke this cycle for me was getting out of bed rather than lying there. Twenty minutes awake and I get up, go to another room, sit under a dim lamp and read something boring on paper until I feel genuinely sleepy, then go back. Usually 25-40 minutes.
It feels counterproductive and it is miserable for the first week. But lying awake in bed for ninety minutes a night teaches your brain that bed is a place where you are awake and thinking about work. Breaking that association was the whole fix for me — about three weeks before the waking got shorter, a couple of months before it mostly stopped.
Worth saying: if you snore, wake up gasping, or feel unrefreshed no matter how long you are down, that is worth raising with a doctor rather than treating as a habits problem.
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@slowmiles_kat · 3mo ago
Three weeks in on this and the wake-up is still happening but I am back asleep in about half an hour instead of ninety minutes. Getting up felt insane at first.
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@aquariumdad · 3mo ago
Keep the lamp genuinely dim and do not check the time while you are up. Clock watching was doing more damage to me than the waking itself.
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