I have difficulty getting to sleep before the early hours - even if I've stayed up all night, and lie in bed for hours, then have extreme difficulty waking up after a reasonable time, so it's normally like 4-5am to 3-4pm. And that's with my housemate trying his best to help me wake up earlier, bless him. It sucks, and I hate it.
I have two young kids, so it’s a little skewed to keep them functioning. I’ve always been an early top bed person, but as I’ve gotten older, my wake-up’s have gotten consistently earlier.
The problem I have nowadays is staying asleep. A life in the military has made it easy to get up even when I’m exhausted, but tough to settle down and go back to sleep. I find that consistent exercise is critical to my sleep schedule. As long as I exercise, I can stay asleep through the night. If my workout schedule gets off, I have a lot of 0400 wakeups.
When I'm stressed I can have really bad middle-of-night insomnia. A few months ago it was terrible. I came across an article about some guy who said to only go to bed when tired and to get up at the same time every morning no matter what. It was hellish while I did it, but after a week or so it started to work. Then after about two weeks, I set a bedtime schedule for myself while still keeping the same wake-up time. Since then, if I do wake in the middle of the night, I treat it like meditation (with the idea that meditation counts as rest) and just lay there focusing on my breathing. I haven't had a three-hour awake time since, and usually it's not more than 20-30 minutes.
This is actually really helpful. I have frequent nighttime awakenings, and it's getting so bad that I want to sleep a lot during the day. Maybe I'll give exercise a go, I haven't tried it as a solution for insomnia yet.
I've found that I need 4 things to wake up consistently
Wake up early, it helps if you're forced to, work meetings, class, meet up, whatever you need
No naps, and getting up at the same time consistently
Manage my stress, a combination of working out consistently and managing work stress
Good sleep hygiene, if I'm exhausted but hit a good part in a book I'll stay up. So it's boring books, blue light blocking on devices, and grey scale and low brightness on my phone
Honestly having a kid and a job helped a bunch. Ultimately you'll get up if you need to.
My ADHD messes my sleep schedule big time, like needing one hour minimum since I go to bed to get asleep, sleeping for 4 or 5 hours, and not being tired at all.
That's why I'm taking melatonin pills (doctor recommendation). Since then, I'm sleeping like a neurotypical.
I struggle a lot with sleep schedule and end up tending towards being nocturnal lol. I end up just staying up all night/day to "reset" it and go to sleep at a regular hour.
the important thing is to just try to make sure you go to sleep at the same time each night (once it's fixed).
I try to get 7.5h of sleep in practice - but in reality. Weeknights are usually 2am - 8:30am (not enough). So then on Saturday I naturally sleep 10 or 11 hours straight to catch up to the lost Z's throughout the week. As a night-owl, but fully employed and accountable at work, it's a difficult game to play - And I'm sure I will pay for it as I get older.
I'm exactly the same as you, asleep around 1:30-2am and up by 8:30. Then weekends I go to sleep later (around 3 am) but sleep in until 11-noon. I'm just thankful to be fully remote for work or else I'd definitely have to change my sleep schedule (probably should anyways).
I think mine is fine, i average 6 hours, sometimes more, sometimes less, not even alarm based since i'm having some off time at the moment, it's just what i feel comfortable with. though when i start my new job i might tighten it a little.
It's been awful lately. I generally only have insomnia when I have irl problems so I'm currently trying to sort those out as best as I can and better sleep should follow suit.
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