[silveyk]

I am in my second week of sleep restriction and I’m still having consistent night time wakings.

To give you some context, prior to sleep restriction, I would go to be around 10:30, fall asleep in about half an hour, wake around 3-4 am and sometimes (but not often) fall back asleep until my alarm rang at 6 am. On weekends I would mess up my body clock entirely by catching up on sleep and sleeping for 8-10 hours.

My current sleep window is 12:00 to 6:00 for a total of six hours. I find myself falling asleep quite quickly but waking up every night around 5 am. When I wake up, I’m sleepier than I would be w/o sleep restriction, but I still never fall back asleep. Going off of the advice to stay in bed while the bed feels good, I’ve been staying in bed sometimes listening to music or meditation. I also recognize that sometimes we pressure ourselves to get more sleep than we need. I can assure you that my body needs more than 5 hours to function well. I am a zombie throughout the day and find myself struggling at work.

Long story short: prior to SRT, on week nights, I would usually wake up around 3 and be unable to fall back asleep, getting usually about 5 hours of sleep. Now with SRT I am waking around 5 and getting the same 5 hours just pushed back and with less chance of falling back asleep since my alarm is going to ring in and hour. Should I be getting out of bed when I wake up at 5 even though I’m still relaxed and sleepy? Is my sleep window off?

Any advice you have is much appreciated. Thank you for taking the time even to read this essay!

[Chee2308]

Hello and thank you for sharing your post. As I read it, I couldn’t help but wonder why you even need to do srt in the first place?? I think the main culprit of your 3 am awakenings is your weekend sleep-ins! You could have eliminated that and then continue going to and getting out of bed at consistent times *every day*, including weekends and the result might have been very different.

How much can you recall how your sleeping pattern was before srt? Try adding up all your sleeptimes for the entire week, including your weekend sleep-ins then divide that by seven to get your average daily sleep time. Add 30 minutes to that and that is the amount of time you should allot for sleep. By fixing your out of bed time, you then arrive at the earliest time you should go to bed. Develop the habit of going to and getting out of bed at regular times and eliminate all sleep-ins and naps. Do this for a few weeks and see what happens. Then whenever you are ready, you can slowly allot more time for sleep by going to bed 15 minutes earlier while keeping out of bed time the same. Keep doing that very gently until you reach your desired sleep duration. Good luck!

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