Same Time Beats Early: Why Your Wake Time Matters More Than 5am

Every September someone tells me to get up at 5am. A podcast, a book, a woman at the counter who's read the book. And every September I watch the same thing happen: 5am on Monday, 6am on Tuesday, 7am by Thursday, and 10am on Sunday because the week was exhausting. By the second week she's tired, she's cross, and she's decided she's just not a morning person.

She isn't a failure. The advice was wrong. The wake time that matters isn't the early one. It's the same one.

What the wake time actually does

Your body runs on a clock, and the clock is set by 2 things: when you get up, and when daylight first reaches your eyes. Not when you go to bed. The bedtime is the end of the day you can't force; the wake time is the end you can.

Here's how it works in practice. Get up at the same time and see daylight within the first hour, and your body starts counting from that moment. Roughly 16 hours later the sleepy feeling arrives, on its own, without you doing anything clever. Move the wake time around by 3 or 4 hours across the week and the count starts from a different place every day, so the sleepy feeling turns up at a different time every night, and you call it insomnia.

That's why the woman waking at 5am on Monday and 10am on Sunday feels jet-lagged. She's given herself a 5-hour time difference without leaving the house.

Why perimenopause makes this harder

2 things change at once, and they need different answers.

The first is progesterone. It falls earliest in perimenopause, before oestrogen starts to swing, and one of the things it does is break down into a substance that calms the brain. So the calming effect goes first, and a lot of women date the whole thing to when their sleep went. That's not in your head; it's the order the hormones change in.

The second is heat. If you're being woken by night sweats, damp when you wake, no sleep routine on earth is going to fix it, because the problem isn't the routine. That one needs the flushes treated, and it's a conversation for your GP or for a consultation, not a leaflet.

So before you change anything, ask yourself one question: what wakes me, and am I damp when it happens? If the answer is yes, the wake time still needs fixing, but it isn't the whole answer.

Early versus the same: what the evidence favours

When sleep specialists treat insomnia without medication, the first-line treatment in this country is a talking therapy called CBT-I, and the very first thing it fixes is a fixed wake time, 7 days a week. Not an early one. The same one. It works better than a fixed bedtime, its effect builds over 4 to 6 weeks, and it holds after the treatment stops, which is more than you can say for a sleeping tablet.

Early on its own does nothing for you. 5am with a midnight bedtime is a sleep debt with a motivational quote on it. 5am with a 9pm bedtime is a lovely life if you can have it, and most women with a job, a family and a late shift can't.

What about the weekend lie-in? Partly, it works. You'll recover some of the debt. But every hour you sleep past your normal wake time pushes Sunday night's sleepy feeling an hour later, and that's the Monday-morning feeling most of us blame on Monday. In the 90 days I'm doing from 14 September, the rule is the same time 6 days out of 7, and the seventh stays inside an hour of normal. That's a lie-in you can have without paying for it.

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3 things that help the clock, if you want them

Any pharmacy magnesium glycinate or vitamin D3 at the same amounts does the same job. Food supplements are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any condition.

The 3 things that move the bedtime

Once the wake time is fixed, the bedtime follows it, unless something is holding it back. 3 things usually are.

Caffeine. Its half-life is 5 to 6 hours, which means a 3pm coffee is still about half-active at bedtime. The cut-off that works for most women is 8 to 10 hours before bed, so midday if you're in bed by 10:30. That's the pharmacist reason, not a preference.

Alcohol. It gets you off to sleep and then wrecks the second half of the night, because it suppresses the deep, dreaming stage and wakes you early. For "I fall asleep fine and wake at 3am", this is usually the biggest single lever there is. Nothing within 3 hours of bed.

Light and heat. Daylight in the morning sets the clock; screens at night confuse it. Phone charging outside the bedroom, room dark and cool at about 18 degrees. That matters more than usual in perimenopause, because your own thermostat is already unreliable.

What to do tonight

Pick a wake time you can keep on a Tuesday and a Sunday. Not the one you'd like, the one you can keep. Set the alarm for it and leave it set.

Tomorrow, get daylight within the first hour. 10 minutes outside, no sunglasses, before the phone. Breakfast within an hour of waking, with proper protein in it, because eating is the second thing your body clock counts from.

Last caffeine at 12pm. Nothing alcoholic after 7pm. Screens off at 10pm, phone out of the room, and lights out when the sleepy feeling arrives, which it will, usually within a week, sometimes 2.

Then don't judge it for a fortnight. The clock takes a week or 2 to move, and the first 3 or 4 days often feel worse before they feel better.

When it isn't a habit problem

Some things are not fixed by a wake time, and I'd rather say so than have you try harder at the wrong thing.

If you snore loudly, if someone has seen you stop breathing, if you wake gasping or with a headache, or if you fall asleep in the day, that needs a sleep study through your GP, and no blood test finds it. It is under-recognised in women and more common after the menopause, and it doesn't look like the picture on the telly.

If you're damp when you wake, it's the flushes, and the flushes have treatments.

And 7 to 9 hours is the working figure. A genuine short sleeper wakes refreshed with no alarm, and that isn't most of us.

The rest of it, the 5am on Monday and 10am on Sunday, is a clock nobody told you how to set. Same time beats early. Start there.

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I write the Beyond Prescriptions newsletter every Sunday. You can sign up here. Education, not medical advice. It does not replace your GP.