[RoyN]

I have started sleep restriction with a 5 hour window of 11pm to 4am.   Hopefully, it goes well and once sleep stabilizes and I am able to increase the window, is it ok to move the wakeup time later rather than go to sleep earlier?

[Steve]

Yes, you can expand on either end. However, I’d like to point out that the minimum sleep window that Martin recommends is 5.5 hours. So your window is a half hour short of that.

[Martin Reed]

Great question, RoyN! It’s up to you how you add time onto your sleep window.

Generally speaking, if you are very sleepy by the start of your sleep window and fall asleep very quickly it’s often a good idea to start the sleep window a bit earlier. If you find it very hard to get out of bed by the end of your sleep window, it can be a good idea to end the sleep window a bit later.

I hope this helps!

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[RoyN]

Martin, thank you for your response.

The reason why this is an issue for me is I can control the time I go to sleep but I cannot control the time I wake up.  I had initially setup a sleep window of 11pm-4:45am but while i was generally falling asleep right away, no matter what I was waking up just before 4am.  Part of the reason is I have a dog living with me part time that is conditioned bark at that time.  I don’t want to be up that early!  🙂

Anyhow, because I held to the sleep window about 10 days into SR, I finally slept all the way up to the alarm at 4:45am.  That was great!  However the next night I had some difficulty falling asleep and I was wondering if it was because I had effectively slept 45 minutes past my conditioned wake up time.  I have always been told to set a wake up time and don’t move it.  While my set wakeup time was 4:45am, in realty it was 4am for the first 10 days of SR.

[Author]

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