Sarah Klein
You might think you’re doing everything right at night. Your bedroom is dark, cool and quiet. You keep your bedtime relatively consistent. You wind down without screens in the hour or so before bed. And yet you still find yourself tossing and turning when it’s time to fall asleep.
It turns out there’s something you might be messing up in the morning that could be making it harder to doze off at night: getting up at a different time each day. Having an inconsistent wake-up time could be setting you up for that frustrating bedtime experience.
The time of day you wake up anchors your circadian rhythm, the internal clock that controls when you feel sleepy and when you feel alert, says licensed psychologist Jennifer Caspari, who practices at Tall Tree Integrated Health in Vancouver, British Columbia, and is trained in cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia.
“The rationale about waking up at the same time is you’re creating a routine. You’re helping reinforce the body’s natural sleep-wake cycle, letting your body know when you should be awake and when you should be asleep,” Caspari says.
Here’s how it’s all connected, and what you can do to get your schedule on track and set yourself up for better sleep.
The science of ‘sleep drive’
There’s a biological reason wake-up time helps dictate bedtime. As soon as you wake up, you start building what’s called sleep drive, or sleep pressure, which refers to your biological need for sleep. It grows the longer you’re awake, as a chemical in the brain called adenosine accumulates, Caspari explains. As it builds over the course of the day, you start to feel more of an urge to sleep.
Then, when you do sleep, your brain clears out the adenosine. “By waking up at the same time each morning, even if you didn’t sleep well the night before, you’re building up that drive throughout the day,” she says.
If you wake up whenever you feel like it, you can inadvertently create a problem at bedtime. Imagine you couldn’t fall asleep one night and ended up finally nodding off around 2am. You decide to let yourself sleep in later than usual because you have a flexible schedule that morning. By the time you get to your usual bedtime the following evening, you won’t have accumulated as much of a sleep drive and won’t feel ready for bed, perpetuating the cycle.
But if you stick to your consistent wake-up time, you’ll feel extra sleepy. “The next night, you’re more likely to sleep on time and keep that rhythm going,” says Neal Walia, a board-certified sleep medicine physician and assistant professor of sleep medicine at UCLA Health.
When Walia talks to people who have insomnia, he emphasises two foundations of good sleep: a consistent wake-up time and going to bed when you’re sleepy.
Walia adds that an inconsistent sleep schedule is also linked to a number of long-term health problems. For example, in a 2024 study of more than 72,000 middle-aged and older adults, the most irregular sleepers were more likely to have heart attacks, strokes and other heart-related problems than people who kept more consistent sleep schedules, even if the irregular sleepers got more than seven hours of rest a night.
And in a 2023 study, the most consistent sleepers (who went to sleep and woke up within a one-hour window most days) were less likely to die during the study period than the least consistent sleepers (who went to sleep and woke up within a three-hour window most days).
How to maintain consistency
“It doesn’t always feel easy to get out of bed [at the same time],” Caspari says. You’ll probably feel a bit groggy and tired if you stayed up extra late the night before or didn’t sleep well. But if you can get going with your day instead of sleeping more, you set yourself up for better sleep later.
Be gentle with yourself on those mornings. It might help to remind yourself, “Yes, it feels really hard right now to get up, but I’m helping myself sleep better tonight,” Caspari says. She also recommends making those early morning moments more enjoyable for yourself in some small way: maybe you get out of bed but you only move to your couch and listen to your favourite podcast while you sip some coffee. “Do something you really like that’s soothing or gentle for the first little while in the morning,” she says.
It can be tempting, especially on the weekends, to sleep in longer if you don’t have to get up at your usual time for work. This is a common pattern for many people, because you’re not always in control of your long commute or your busy evenings that cut into your weeknight sleep, Walia says. Then you get to the weekend and feel like you finally have a chance to catch up on rest.
Caspari’s fix is to allow a little leeway: sleeping an additional 30 to 60 minutes isn’t usually too disruptive and feels better to many people psychologically than being super-rigid about their wake-up times, she says. But any more than that is likely to affect your body’s sleep-wake schedule.
For people having trouble getting up at the same time every day, Walia suggests getting more natural sunlight first thing in the morning. Sit by a window while you sip your coffee, or go for a walk outside for 20 minutes or so, he says. Bright light therapy with a light box can help if you can’t get outside or it’s dark where you are, he adds.
For many people Walia works with, he says, simply learning about sleep drive helps them stay more consistent. “They say, ‘Oh, I just didn’t think it worked that way, I just focused on trying to maintain a consistent bedtime,’” he says.
Washington Post
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