I usually fall asleep around 22:30-23 and have to wake up around 6 for school. I’m a night person so I can’t really get to sleep before that. Also, the sound of my alarm is physically painful so I tend to be half-awake a while before it in anxious anticipation. High schoolers (I’m USian) need more sleep than most people, so I feel miserable on less than nine hours and deteriorate throughout the week. Idk how some people do it on even less sleep. My head buzzes and I can’t focus most of the time during the school day. On weekends I used to get 11-12 hours to make up for my sleep debt, but I haven’t been able to since daylight savings time. I can now barely get ten hours a lot of the time, leaving me tired enough to have a strong tendency to go on social media without much energy for else.
Any advice? I can provide more information if necessary.
I’ve struggled with sleep most of my life, undersleeping and oversleeping. I know you probably don’t want to hear this, and I hate to say it but the times when I’ve had my best streaks of good sleep have been when I’ve been exercising, which is not very regularly. If you’re not already getting daily exercise then consider something like the couch to 5 k programme maybe?
Oh yeah, I climb three days a week and walk a good deal. It does wake me up. Usually that just makes 21:00 my time of peak energy.
Then I’m out of ideas. Good luck!
You’re young, so you might not be able to get around needing sleep. I usually get 5-6ish hours of sleep, and get up around 7. Some things I feel have been helpful for me:
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Getting ready at night for the morning - when I’ve had a commute, I’d lay out my bag the night before. Now I set out a jar for water, my morning vitamins, and another jar for my morning tea/matcha. For a while I’d cold brew a bag of tea overnight for the morning.
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Sleep hygiene - I sleep with an eye mask, a white noise machine, a fan, blackout curtains, and I mostly use red lights where possible at night. I feel like it’s been helpful to sit in front of a sunny window while I wake up in the morning. I keep the blue light filter on my phone at night.
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Maximizing sleep time - I’ll set my alarm 15 minutes later on days I can get away with it. A 15 min cat nap in the evening is way more helpful than you’d think.
Idk if that can give you any helpful ideas. I’m pretty tired and have a hard time focusing most of the time, so who knows if it’s working for me!
I do prepare things ahead and have set my alarm later than it was. Unfortunately that means I lay awake longer in anticipation of my alarm.
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If you’d like to go to bed earlier but have trouble doing it - try taking melatonin 60-90 minutes before the desired bedtime. It both helps to fall asleep faster and to shift your natural hormone production over a couple of weeks.
Another thing is that you might be setting an alarm for the wrong time. You have different phases of sleep that make up a ~90 minute cycle, though the actual length varies. Ideally you’d want to wake up right between those cycles. Since you said you usually get around 7 hours of sleep, that likely puts your alarm right in the middle of deep sleep. Try setting it an hour earlier and add 10 minutes every day to find a sweet spot, you’ll know the difference.
Also naps are sick. Either for 20-25 minutes so you don’t fall too deep, or a full 100+ minute cycle (first one is a bit longer than the rest).
And finally sleep hygiene is important. Dim light and screens (better yet no screens) an hour before bed, no big meals or caffeine, preferably a chilly room. Chamomile tea absolutely slaps, too. Sleep well comrade.
I don’t have insomnia, I just always feel tired. I’ll try the “sweet spot” thing. I find caffeine only increases my natural night time energy, it doesn’t help during the day.
I tried setting my alarm an hour back last night and actually got to sleep an hour earlier, but I semi-awoke earlier due to my fear of the alarm. I feel better because I had the time to meditate, but otherwise idk.
The window for you to wake up easily is around 20 minutes. Just keep adjusting for the next few days. Sleep isn’t something that can be fixed overnight, it’s a very complex process that isn’t even fully understood.
Another thing that helped me was to change my framing of the wake-up time. I used to be like “it’s 11pm, I have an alarm set for 6am, if I fall asleep right now - it’s 7 hours, pretty good. Gotta sleep!”. And then half an hour later it’s 6:30 left to sleep, then it’s only 6 hours. I’d often lay through the entire night like that. And so what helped was to start thinking “I’m getting up at 6, and there’s that. Until then I have time to myself, and if I can fall asleep - cool, if not - I’ll watch some youtube on my phone, or grab a snack, whatever”.
When I stopped treating sleep like this expensive commodity that loses value every moment that I’m awake, and instead started to tell myself that it’s just another thing to do, it alleviated a lot of pressure. Fighting yourself to sleep isn’t going to work long-term, you’re much better off listening to your body and going with it. Even if it means some days you’ll have less hours clocked in bed.
Idk if it was a decisive factor, but I feel pretty good today, at least after the first couple hours of school when I was still hazy. Music, meditation and other stuff probably helped.
I’m already half awake for a while before the alarm goes off, so idk. I’ll try the ten minute adjustments and see. I probably think about sleep too much like that. Definitely not watching YouTube, but I like to read at night, I just fear it will cut into my sleep if I do it too much.
6 a.m not super early, but i envy you to have the capacity to sleep ten hours+.
i used to wake up at 4 am to go to college, today i’m burned and have bad insomnia, i sleep 6 hours or less, and bad quality sleep almost all days wake up felling tired or with a headache, and unable to take a nap no matter how tired, and need to take lots of dipyrone and paracetamol.
Damn. Am I the only one here who wakes up early because I like to?
Morning people exist, there’s just not too many it seems. Yet that’s what the system wants us to be. I recall Benjamin Franklin said something about going to bed early and waking up early and superior qualities or something, so it’s not new. Ig you’re lucky.
It’s all about life style. I work 3 am to noon Monday to Friday so you best believe on my weekends I am up at like 5-6 am because those are the only days I actually get to do stuff in the morning. I like to spend my weekends out hiking and rockhounding and stuff so it’s best to start early and get the most out of the day. Once you work full time you start to value the mornings you do have free a lot more.
It is most certainly not about lifestyle. There is literally a genetic component to when your body wants to sleep. Back in the hunter gatherer times this was evolutionarily valuable because more people could keep watch at night. Now, everyone is expected to get up at 6 am and for some of us it is excruciating, every single day.
And for some of us it isn’t excruciating at all. Almost like different people can have different Circadian rhythms. Almost like it doesn’t fucking matter what people used to do in hunter gatherer societies. Almost like everyone has different genetics and might not need exactly similar amounts of sleep. Almost like you can learn to adapt to different sleep schedules over time. Crazy right. Lmfao
“And for some of us it isn’t excruciating at all” yeah so maybe organizing society in a way that a lot of people find unbearable because some people find it personally ok is… idk, fucked up? You can continue getting up at 6 am, just don’t make it the societal requirement you fucking clown. Jesus Christ do you only think about yourself?
When I’m camping, yeah that seems to happen. Not in the city…
Have you tried polyphasic sleep? Sounds like you’re definitely not getting enough sleep, so you’ll have go find the time somewhere. The sleep doesn’t have to be all within one block of the 24-hour cycle, though, and for some people they even find that two shorter sleeps is so much more effective that they sleep less in total.
Can you have a nap when you get home from school?
On two days I’d have the chance. I find naps make me feel more tired when I wake up, and would probably mess with my ability to get to sleep later. They mostly just mess with the continuity of the day though.
Ah, fair enough. Fwiw, I also rarely have the energy outside work for anything but scrolling here and making a few comments nowadays. And I don’t have naps, either (I’d have them if I had the time). So I’m probably not the best person to be giving advice.
I can vouch for keeping it under 45 minutes at most. If you get a long nap it can really mess you up and make you groggy but if I just set aside 20-40 minutes to just relax in bed I’ll usually doze and feel fine when I get up. Your mileage may vary.
I’ve heard they’re best 20 or 40 minutes or two hours, so that’s what I’ve done on rare occasions that I’ve napped.
Are you me? I hated getting up ridiculously early for high school, and also felt tired throughout the week. College was a little better in terms of class schedules, but then joining the workforce I was back to waking up too early and being tired.
In terms of what helped me get at least a little more sleep, I’d try to get as much ready the night before as possible. Clothes, coffee, lunch, etc. It got me 10-15 minutes extra sleep each night - nowhere near what I needed, but still better than nothing.
Other than that, it’s a long shot, but could your school provide any accommodation to your class schedule with a doctor’s note?
Maybe I’m you. I love learning, but the greatest negative factor in my life right now is school forcing me to get up early. In an ideal society (communism duh) school would be much shorter and we’d learn more because we’re awake and focused in that time. One of my greatest fears is becoming a wage slave. I get my stuff ready before I go to bed, I’m just at my best at that time too so I naturally use my awakeness to read and stuff. There’s no way in hell I could get the school to let me sleep in with a doctors note. My friend had to leave the school because she they wouldn’t excuse her absences for acute migraines.
Edit: Even the most well meaning and smart teachers/schools are trying to prepare their students for a life under capitalism so the problem’s origin totally makes sense.
I used to be a night owl too. I remember having that rush of energy around 10 or 11. Now I just kinda coast through the day, haha.
I hear you about not wanting to be a wage slave. One ok job I had was substitute teaching. Especially in elementary school, the hours weren’t too early, there was no planning or grading responsibilities, and the pay was adequate. Plus it didn’t hurt that I liked teaching and the kids were usually enjoyable.
Nice, teaching sounds nice, but I do not want to have to wake up this early in my adult life too. Might be an option.
My “fall asleep earlier than my body wants to” routine is light exercise earlier in the day (to clarify how light, even something like just climbing 8 flights of stairs at work 8 hours earlier), getting off of the computer/phone an hour or so before bed, and melatonin.
Everyone’s gonna give you a bunch of sleep hygiene tips and they are probably all fantastic but they never worked for me in part due to ADHD but also in part due to genuine boughts of insomnia. At your age I just toughed through it getting 4-6 hours of sleep most nights and only staying awake because of my stimulants medications.
If the recommended sleep hygiene tips end up working for you I am happy for you but if they do not… there are less healthy methods of dealing with sleeplessness. I start my mornings with coffee now and lots of it, I cannot express enough how much this has helped me. This will eventually bite you in the ass when you have a full blown dependency but it’s great short term (like a year or two). Just avoid drinking coffee too late in that day when you can, I don’t do this but I should.
I also recommend loud music, blast it directly into your skull. Cold showers also help but they are miserable tbh. The occasional altoid can also wake you up for a short time. Basically anything that shocks one or more of senses. Taking naps also helps in a pinch but don’t go over 45 minutes if you can help it, set alarms. Also over the counter sleep medication can help but isn’t something you should take too regularly
Obviously none of this is healthy and you should do your best to establish good sleep hygiene but I am not a healthy person and this is what it takes to keep me functioning. Do what you must
That reminds me. One thing that did help with my awake-time energy levels, leaving me a bit more tired at bed time, was changing my approach to caffeine.
I used to have caffeine as soon as I woke up. But I learned that for me, it was better to wait at least 90 minutes before having my first caffeine. I cant remember the science. But it means that I don’t get that energy slump around eight hours later.
That leaves me with more energy at the end of work, to do things that I would have previously done when I was supposed to be sleeping.
Idk, though. @QueerCommie@lemmygrad.ml, it may not be the best idea to start messing around with caffeine if you’re young. At least without maybe talking to a medical person.
Caffeine doesn’t seem to work on me like that. I’ve tried eating chocolate covered espresso beans like pills or drinking tea in the morning, but it only kicks in at night (assuming I take it after 14:00, otherwise it’s nothing). Instead of a slump at the end of the day I finally have full energy. I suppose this means I’m more liberated in my free time and couldn’t give a good effort/attention if I tried in school, but that doesn’t make that time less miserable.
The best recommendation for sleep hygiene for me was to stop all caffeine consumption after lunch. Caffeine can really mess with your ability to get restful sleep, even if you’re technically sleeping, as can other substances that you’re probably not taking (like alcohol, other stimulants, etc). Exercising is also good, but you have to find the most effective time of day for you.
I definitely struggled with sleep problems as a teenager (and adult), and I wasn’t able to really fix it until well into my 20’s.
I woke up today at 5:30 am and I just laid on my bed fully awake until 6:50 am, I could’ve used it to read or listened to a podcast or took a shower, but instead I chose nothing.
Drink chamomile tea an hour before bed for better 😴
I wouldn’t call it “surviving” but if I have to get up at 4:00 because it’s the morning shift week, I end up just pushing myself through the night once I realize it’s like 01:00. So I do some gaming in the meantime. Or just semi-stay awake because there’s only half an hour of night during the summer.
Living at +60°N (not too far away from the Arctic Circle) is a fuck. Death to America
Magnesium. Helps to keep your roof intact
