[AmyL]

I have no problem falling asleep but I wake up around 3:30 to 4:00 am almost every day. Over the summer, I was on medication for a shoulder injury and finally felt what it was like to sleep 7 to 8 hours every night. I can’t see taking muscle relaxants every day for the rest of my life though so I’m now looking for a long term solution to this problem.

I’ve tried a lot of the tips and suggestions that I’ve found online but nothing helps.

Any ideas?

[Chee2308]

Hello!

When you woke up at 330-400 what did you usually do? Get up and start your day or just continue lying in bed?

[AmyL]

Sometimes I get up … like if my back hurts. Other times I try to go back to sleep … sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

[Chee2308]

It’s good to hear you are still resting after waking up. So my question then is have you researched biphasic sleep? It means you divide your sleep period into two distinct segments. You can look up, Biphasic Sleep: What It Is And How It Works, in google and an article by the sleep foundation, which is fact-checked, explains what it is and how it works. Apparently, it is really common among humans and other animals alike to sleep like this. A lot of normal sleepers wake up after sleeping for 3-5 hours, myself included. That first part of sleep is usually quite deep, when I would pass out and remember nothing about it until I woke up. Then I would get up, use the toilet and go back to bed to sleep for the second part. The later part is characterized by more light sleep, lots of vivid dreams and a lot of morning glories if you are male too. I heard this is when most of REM sleep occurs because dreaming happens more. So if I told you that what you are experiencing is actually quite normal, would you feel more at ease? Don’t fight the wake ups, accept them and move on. After waking up, going back to bed is your first choice to try to see if you can fall back asleep. Otherwise, you could get up and do something light and non strenuous and try again after an hour. I read most people in pre-industrial age actually did this so perhaps what you experience is just an remnant of what people used to do then. Good luck.

[AmyL]

Sometimes I get additional rest. Often I don’t. That biphasic idea might work if I didn’t have an alarm going off Monday through Friday. Often it takes so long to try and go back to sleep that it’s time to get up before I get any more rest, if I fall back asleep at all.

[Martin Reed]

Hello Amy! What time do you usually go to bed at night? When you wake between 3:30 AM and 4:00 AM, why do you think it’s hard to fall back to sleep?

If you were able to fall back to sleep, what would you be doing differently with your life?

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[Author]

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