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Comment by netvarun | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have any tips/advice to solve the inverse problem which is waking up on a regular schedule?

I mostly follow sleep best practices - no phone before sleep, sleeping at a regular time, meditation, blackout curtains, no caffeine after noon, etc and am able to fall asleep. But however I have a problem with waking up. I either need 9+ hours of sleep or I’m awake in just 5 hours - almost a bimodal distribution. The lack of consistency makes it very frustrating to plan the day. Considering I got to bed around the same time each day, not being to able to wake up on the same time is quite puzzling to me.

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As a night owl, I abandoned the consistent bedtime approach and went with a pure consistent waketime. The approach that worked for me was having the same wake time, irrespective of time of year, light levels, or tiredness. There are some days when I'm a zombie because I messed up and stayed up too late, but I treat that as a negative reinforcement learning.

The second step was to immediately get out of bed. No matter how warm it was, or how tired I am, no matter how much my brain protested. I moved my alarm to the other side of the room to facilitate this.

What made it stick for me was giving myself permission to be sleepy after the alarm, but not be sleepy in my bed. Many days I stop my alarm, and immediately go to the couch and give my brain some time to boot up before even going to the bathroom or having breakfast

It might be worth saying I _only_ sleep in bed (no reading, no phone, only sleep) and I make sure to _never_ sleep on the couch

Thanks for the detailed write up. Quite a few actionable ideas for me to experiment with. This is helpful!

5 hours is almost certainly not enough, and plenty of people need more than 8 hours, so 9 hours is probably what you need.

Are you able to go back to sleep after 5 hours if you try?

For a lot of people anxiety is the culprit -- for some people it prevents them from falling asleep, for others it wakes them up early. If anxiety is coming and going in your life, whether on a daily or weekly basis, that might be the explanation for the 5-hour nights.

I've read (or might be a YT video) that this could be genetic, some people have evolved to wake up at certain hours (something about provide protection to other tribe members).

This is all from my recollection, so you'll have to google around to get the scientific details.

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