Ask Lemmy

The sun has been raising earlier so I have been waking up earlier. Today woke up at 6am

Sleep has always been a challenge for me. I medicated I will either not be able to fall asleep until 2-3 in the morning, or will fall asleep around 11-12, and wake up at 4-5 am.

Throughout the years I’ve tried various modifications to my sleep routine, and am no stranger to medications to help me sleep. (Doctor supervised, while paying attention to all side effects and interactions. Do not try to manage your own sleep without significant research. Case in point: Long term use of diphenhydramine (Benadryl) has been linked to dementia.)

I’ve found that of the things in my sleep routine, the melatonin is the best tool I have to facilitate falling asleep, and having an outlet for my energy during the day is the best way to ensure staying asleep.

It’s also useful to note your surroundings. During winter I’m woken up a lot at exactly 4:40 am, because a neighbor uses their remote start, which causes their car to beep 4 times. (It’s very annoying, because they park on the street outside of my place and start their car as they’re walking to it, so it’s not as if the beeping is for a useful purpose.)
Is something else environmental happening?

I had this happen around 35. Job, family related stress, and age are my best guess. Ambien was great for getting to sleep, but would wear off and I'd still wake up, same with the extended release. My doctor decided to try 10mg of Valium. This gets me through the night for years now. I still wake up, but it keeps the panic of existence from setting in and I'm able to turn over and get back to sleep.

I awaken naturally at 4am with or without an alarm. But it has always been this way for me. I was raised on a farm so early rising was always sort of the expectation but it definitely suits my natural rhythms. I do come from a long line of dairy farmers, so there’s probably some selection going on there.

Now for context, I have placed a high priority on sleep hygiene for a very long time. So I usually get 8.5-9 hours of sleep a night. That’s just what experience tells me I need for optimal functioning.

It is a strange life choice. I am not really into nightlife, so I am aware there is an alternate universe of night owls out there, but those worlds rarely collide with mine. I’m ready for a afternoon nap about the time many people start to think about brunch.

Maybe its due to the latestagecapitalism.exe virus has been infecting "earth" gameservers? Which would explain the missing serotonin.dll files in some player characters, which causes the "depression" debuff, and thus fucking up their sleepcycle.sys process.

It's the only time I can get any worms

That's been happening to me for years. You start randomly waking up earlier and then you're so tired you start going to bed earlier and the next thing you know you're wide awake at 3AM most days. I tried melatonin but it doesn't last the night and gave me weird dreams. Low dose CBD gummies (~2mg) have helped and now I'm sleeping till 5AM. It started in my late 40s so maybe it's age related.

There's tons of possible reasons for this:

Did you recently hit maybe age 35 or older?

Drinking more in the evening?

Working out less?

Stressed out in general?

Too much screen time before bed?

Thin curtains and not realizing the sun comes up earlier every day as summer approaches?

Birds?

Something you can hear outside that's waking up, like a loud car that drives by at the same time, people talking, etc.?

Impending sense of doom overall?

I read all the comments, they're all wrong. It's actually the Moon energy flow that's moving from wax on to wax off. Or was it wax off to wax on? I forget. Anyway, you need to surround yourself with anti wax on wax off energy stones or pro wax off wax on energy absorbing stones.

Just place one above your pillow on a stand, shake it a little while lying down and you will soon be on your way to having a restful and peaceful sleep.

Are you in the northern hemisphere? The sun is rising earlier and earlier.

Anxiety?

I never had trouble sleeping til recently and now I wake up multiple times a night and have trouble falling back asleep. Even before when I'd get nightmares (which was often) I could go back to sleep. Those days are over. This has been my life since November and no, I'm not even American. So that's where I'm at.

Coincidentally, same here. The sun is rising earlier and I have a ton of light in my bedroom

I was just reading about nocturnal hyperglycemia waking people up during the night just the other day. So, it could be a blood sugar crash

Birds.

The god damned fucking birds outside my window scream their god-damned beaks off at 6:00 fucking AM just to get some tail-feather.

This shit always starts in the spring, every year. Where I am, it's been going on for a bit more than "a week ago", but that's what's been waking me up in the mornings.

I keep earplugs next to my bed. I don't want to wear them all night because my superpower is overproducing earwax and I'd have to imagine wearing plugs all night would exacerbate that. So I put in the plugs when the birds wake me, roll over, and then sleep another couple of hours until my alarm goes off. (And, yes, my alarm reliably wakes me even with the ear plugs.)

When this happens to me, I ask my subconscious to talk to me. Sometimes it does when I fall asleep again in very explicit and usually symbolic, but easy to instantly understand dreams. It's been... wild. And liberating, when I do the healing work.

Alcohol can contribute to sleep disruption, even in small quantities

Yes! Used to be a night owl but I've been getting up at 5am for no reason for a while now. I quite like it tbh. I feed birds on my windowsill, play with my cat, have coffee and breakfast and check the news, all without feeling like I should be doing something else because there's only so much you can do this early. I'm also no longer late all the time.

It could definitely be stress-related, especially if you had a particularly bad night of sleep before this started.

When you don’t sleep well, your body can reset its cortisol production cycle. Cortisol—the hormone tied to stress and alertness—typically starts rising in the early hours of the morning, around 3–4 a.m., as part of a normal circadian rhythm.

But if you're under even mild or subconscious stress, that spike can happen earlier or be stronger than usual, causing you to wake up prematurely and feel too alert to fall back asleep.

It's like your body's stuck in a "high alert" mode even if nothing obvious is triggering it.

Could be the birds that have already been mentioned as well, I am no expert, nor medical trained, but this reason is more common than you might think when waking up early. It's the same reason you might find yourself waking before the alarm when you really need to be on time, like before going on vacation and you cannot miss your flight.

Here is a link to one of many in regards to sleep and cortisol

https://sleepdoctor.com/pages/health/cortisol

(edit: added part of the sentence that got lost before posting and figured I might add a link if someone wants to read more)

I wake up every day between 4-5AM (I like how quiet the city is this early in the morning, it's my favorite working time), and I never needed much sleep to begin with, so I may not be the best suited to tell you how to sleep better but:

• Does it happen yearly? Change of season can do a lot...
• As other have suggested: stress is a frequent explanation.
• Have you changed anything in your evening habits? I don't know, more screen, new food, new anything? Or stopped doing something else?