Waking up and realizing you’ve got a few more hours left before your alarm clock rings is usually a wonderful feeling. But if you struggle to drift back off to sleep, that feeling soon becomes anxiety and irritation. And if this happens night after night, you can end up with some serious sleep deprivation.
To make matters more complicated, there are many reasons you may be waking up early and so many factors to address when you’re trying to sleep through the night.
Below, we’ll cover the reasons you’re waking up early and what you can do to solve them. Plus, we’ll show you how the RISE app can help you get a full night’s sleep night after night.
“You may wake up earlier than you’d like because that’s what your circadian rhythm is telling your body to do. Try to keep a regular sleep pattern, get morning sunlight, and keep your evenings dark to keep your circadian rhythm running smoothly,” says Dr. Chester Wu, who is double board certified in Psychiatry and Sleep Medicine, and provides sleep medicine services, medication management, and psychotherapy to adults at his private sleep medicine and psychiatry practice.
Many factors could be waking you up too early. Let’s dive into them.
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Your circadian rhythm is your body’s roughly 24-hour internal clock. It dictates your sleep-wake cycle and, when everything’s running smoothly, should match up with the light-dark cycle of the outside world and your ideal sleep-wake times.
But if you get out of sync with your circadian rhythm, you could find your body wakes you up earlier than you’d like and you’ll be alert when you don’t want to be.
You might be out of sync with your circadian rhythm if:
How does this happen exactly? One reason is cortisol. Cortisol is known as the stress hormone and it helps to wake you up in the morning as part of your circadian rhythm. But if your cortisol production happens at the wrong time, you may find yourself waking up early.
This can be one reason you’re waking up early, no matter what time you go to bed.
For example, if you’re trying to sleep in a few hours more than usual (perhaps after a late night, or to catch up on sleep after a busy week) you may find yourself waking up after six hours of sleep, perhaps around your usual wake-up time.
The fix: Keep a consistent sleep schedule, even on your days off. If you need to catch up on sleep, snooze for only an hour or two and make the most of afternoon naps.
If you want to sleep later every morning, you can reset your circadian rhythm and push it back. This can be useful if you’re an early bird, but need to stay up later for work and sleep in longer to get the sleep you need.
We’ve covered how to reset your circadian rhythm here.
RISE can predict your circadian rhythm each day, so you can see when your body naturally wants to wake up, and if you’re trying to sleep past this.
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can click here to see their circadian rhythm on the Energy screen.
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If you keep waking up early, poor sleep hygiene may be to blame.
Sleep hygiene is the name for behaviors you can do daily to help you fall and stay asleep each night. Get these behaviors wrong and it’ll be harder to stay asleep.
For example:
The fix: Improve your sleep hygiene. RISE can tell you when to do 20+ healthy sleep habits daily. We’ll cover these habits in more detail soon.
And to learn more, we’ve covered:
Stress and anxiety can stop you from falling asleep, but they can also wake you up in the night.
And if you wake up to use the bathroom or because of a sound, and then get stressed about falling back to sleep or about the next day’s to-do list, your cortisol levels may spike. You may then struggle to relax enough to drift back off.
You may even be anxious about sleeping through your alarm, or accidentally hitting the snooze button and missing an important meeting. This can cause the opposite problem and lead to waking up too early.
The fix: Try setting two alarms or different alarms (one with sound and one with light, for example) if you have anxiety about waking up on time. The RISE alarm can wake you up using multiple methods simultaneously, including sound, vibration, and haptics on your Apple watch, if you have the RISE Apple watch complication installed.
If you’ve woken up early because of anxiety, try doing a breathing exercise to get back to sleep. Breathing exercises have been proven to lower stress, anxiety, and blood pressure, and help you drift off.
We’ve covered how to do these breathing exercises here.
And RISE can guide you through breathing exercises, like diaphragmatic breathing, and relaxation techniques, like progressive muscle relaxation, in the app.
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can click here to go right to their relaxation audio guide homepage and get started.
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It’s not always something internal that’s waking you up early. Sometimes, something in your bedroom or outside your home can stop you from sleeping for as long as you’d like.
If you’re waking up early all of a sudden, a once-in-a-while disturbance could be to blame.
This could be:
It’s much easier to be woken up by something in your environment in the second half of the night. You can blame sleep pressure for that. This is your natural urge to sleep. It builds up all the time you’re awake as the chemical adenosine builds up in your system.
Adenosine then dissipates while you sleep and is mostly cleared in the first half of the night. This makes you more vulnerable to being woken up in the second half of the night. And once you’re awake, you may not have enough sleep pressure to fall back asleep.
Most of the time, the circadian rhythm of your body temperature helps to stop this from happening. Your temperature reaches its lowest in the second half of the night, promoting sleep. But if your temperature is thrown off, you may find this — and other factors — can wake you up.
The fix: Before you go to bed, make sure your bedroom is cool, dark, and quiet, and will stay that way until morning. Try setting your thermostat to 65 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit, investing in blackout curtains, and wearing earplugs and an eye mask.
RISE can remind you to check your sleep environment before you go to sleep.
If your partner gets up long before you and often flips on the lights or makes noise, consider sleeping in separate rooms, if possible.
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can click here to set up their check environment habit reminder.
Pregnancy can easily disrupt your sleep and wake you up earlier than you’d like. You’ve got hormonal changes messing with your mood and body temperature, symptoms like nausea and leg cramps, and just the fact that finding a comfortable sleep position gets harder as your pregnancy progresses.
The fix: Try taking afternoon naps to catch up on the sleep you’re missing out on at night. You may find it easier to sleep for short periods of time. Nap during your afternoon dip in energy (RISE can tell you when this is), so you still feel sleepy come bedtime.
We’ve covered more on how to sleep when pregnant here, including tips for every trimester.
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can click here to see their upcoming energy peaks and dips on the Energy screen.
As we age, a good night’s sleep becomes harder to come by. You may find yourself waking up early because you need the bathroom more often, because of pain or discomfort, or from menopause symptoms.
Another common culprit is your circadian rhythm, yet again. As we age, our circadian rhythms shift earlier. That means we naturally become early risers.
Our sleep cycles also get shorter as we age. We spend less time in deep sleep, meaning more time in the sleep stages (like light sleep) that are more easily disturbed.
The fix: Shift your bedtime earlier to make sure you’re getting enough sleep overall.
RISE can tell you the amount of sleep you need (known as your sleep need). Contrary to popular belief, older adults don’t need less sleep — sleep is just harder to get.
When we compared the sleep need of RISE users, we found the median sleep need for users over 60 was 8.3 hours, while the median sleep need for users ages 24-59 was 8.4 hours; a difference of only a few minutes.
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can click here to view their sleep need.
You might think of insomnia as trouble falling asleep, but waking up too early (and then struggling to get back to sleep) can also be a sign of the sleep disorder. This type of insomnia is called early morning awakening insomnia.
And, unfortunately, the more anxiety you get about waking up early, the more you may find yourself waking up early. This is conditioned arousal, where your body learns to be awake and alert at the wrong times, like when you’re in bed.
Insomnia can be caused by:
The fix: Speak to your healthcare provider or a sleep specialist if you think you’re waking up early because of insomnia.
They’ll be able to recommend the best treatment for you, which could be lifestyle changes, medication, or cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I).
Counterintuitively, sleep restriction (or intentionally sleeping for less time) can help cure insomnia. This method should only be tried with professional guidance, however.
Sleep apnea is a sleep disorder that causes your airways to close off during the night. When your brain notices you’re not getting enough oxygen, it’ll wake you up to kickstart your breathing. You may wake up gasping for breath, and then struggle to relax and fall back to sleep.
Research shows sleep apnea episodes are also longer and more severe during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep. And you get more REM during the second half of the night.
The fix: Speak to your healthcare provider or a sleep specialist if you have sleep apnea symptoms. These include:
We’ve covered how to know if you have sleep apnea here.
Sometimes, a health problem or medical condition could be waking you up early.
These include:
Some medications can also mess with your sleep, including:
The fix: If you’re waking up early for no apparent reason, speak to your healthcare provider or a sleep specialist. They can run tests for an underlying medical condition that could be to blame, or switch up your medication if needed.
We asked our sleep advisor and medical reviewer, Dr. Chester Wu, for his thoughts on why people wake up early. Here’s what we had to say.
“You may wake up earlier than you’d like because that’s what your circadian rhythm is telling your body to do. Try to keep a regular sleep pattern, get morning sunlight, and keep your evenings dark to keep your circadian rhythm running smoothly.” Rise Science Medical Reviewer Dr. Chester Wu
The best thing you can do to stop yourself from waking up early is to improve your sleep hygiene.
With good sleep hygiene, you’ll be cutting out many of the triggers for waking up too early. And you’ll be giving yourself the best chance of a healthy night’s sleep overall.
Here’s what to do:
To remember all these behaviors, RISE can guide you through 20+ sleep hygiene habits each day and tell you the ideal time to do them.
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can click here to set up their 20+ in-app habit notifications.
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If you wake up early and you haven’t had enough sleep, you’d ideally want to fall back to sleep. But that’s easier said than done. If you can’t get back to sleep, try doing a sleep reset.
After 20 minutes of trying to fall back to sleep, get out of bed and do a relaxing activity, like reading or meditation.
Avoid looking at the time, so you don’t get anxious, and keep the lights low, so you don’t wake yourself up too much.
If you need light, try a red light night light. Research shows red light doesn’t disrupt your melatonin production or circadian rhythm as much as other wavelengths of light.
If you start getting sleepy again, great! Try crawling back into bed and getting a few extra hours of sleep.
If not, don’t panic. Simply enjoy some bonus me-time. The aim here isn’t to get back to sleep exactly, it’s to stop your brain from associating being in bed with wakefulness, also known as stimulus control.
While it’s not something to worry about in the middle of the night, you do want to keep an eye on your sleep debt overall. Sleep debt is the measure of how much sleep you owe your body.
If you’re not getting enough sleep at night, you’ll build up sleep debt, and this can lead to lower energy, mood, and productivity the next day — not to mention a whole host of health problems.
At RISE, we track your sleep time and work out your sleep debt over the course of 14 nights. The good news here is one night of waking up too early and struggling to get back to sleep won’t make or break your health.
We recommend keeping your sleep debt below five hours overall. Going to bed a little earlier or taking naps can help you keep your sleep debt low if waking up early is stopping you from getting enough sleep.
Use RISE to find out whether you’re carrying any sleep debt.
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can click here to view their sleep need and here to view their sleep debt.
There are many reasons why you might be waking up too early. They include external factors, such as environmental disturbances like temperature, light, and noise. They also include internal factors, like your circadian rhythm, sleep disorders like sleep apnea, and/or medical issues, like heartburn.
To help you sleep through until morning, focus on your sleep hygiene. This will eliminate many triggers for waking up too early. The RISE app can guide you through 20+ sleep hygiene habits and tell you the exact right time to do each one.
Plus, RISE can predict your circadian rhythm, so you can see if you’re trying to sleep in past your body’s natural wake-up time. You can then sync up with it for better sleep and energy levels.
And it may not take long to see the benefits — 80% of RISE users get more sleep within five days.
There are many reasons why you might be waking up too early. They include external factors, such as environmental disturbances like temperature, light, and noise. They also include internal factors, like your circadian rhythm, sleep disorders like sleep apnea, and/or medical issues, like heartburn.
There are many reasons why you might be waking up early all of a sudden. They include external factors, such as environmental disturbances like temperature, light, and noise. They also include internal factors, like your circadian rhythm, sleep disorders like sleep apnea, and/or medical issues, like heartburn.
There are many reasons why you might wake up at 4 am for no reason. They include external factors, such as environmental disturbances like temperature, light, and noise. They also include internal factors, like your circadian rhythm, sleep disorders like sleep apnea, and/or medical issues, like heartburn.
There are many reasons why you might wake up at 5 am and can’t go back to sleep. They include external factors, such as environmental disturbances like temperature, light, and noise. They also include internal factors, like your circadian rhythm, sleep disorders like sleep apnea, and/or medical issues, like heartburn.
There are many reasons why you might wake up early no matter what time you go to bed. They include external factors, such as environmental disturbances like temperature, light, and noise. They also include internal factors, like your circadian rhythm, sleep disorders like sleep apnea, and/or medical issues, like heartburn.
If you wake up early and haven’t had enough sleep, you’d ideally want to go back to sleep. If you can’t fall back to sleep after 20 minutes of trying, do a sleep reset. Get up and do a relaxing activity, like reading, with the lights low. When you feel sleepy again, get back into bed.
RISE makes it easy to improve your sleep and daily energy to reach your potential
