The hell is wrong with my internal clock?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I cannot start falling asleep until 2 AM or so. It’s baffling. I have to get up around 730 so it’s not as if I’m sleeping in; I don’t nap midday or drink stuff with caffeine in it later in the day. My brain just doesn’t want to sleep prior to that. I am simply fully awake at midnight, at 1 AM. Honestly, it’s becoming very apparent that 4-5 hours of sleep a night ain’t enough. It’s affecting my life.

Anyone else struggle with this?

2

I used to struggle with it all the time. By Friday I was dragging pretty badly and did damage to my stomach with office coffee intake. Then I would sleep away Saturday mornings and that would kind of suck.

Something clicked when I hit 50 and those nights are thankfully rare now. I know exercise helps the situation but I can’t claim working out at 8pm will let you fall asleep at 10pm. It isn’t that simple by a long shot.

Less caffeine does help. I keep my coffee intake to overwhelmingly mornings. Usually only 12oz a day. I largely stopped drinking Ice Tea also and no other caffeine for that matter. But again, it isn’t that simple either.

I wish I had a fix, but I did get over it and am now moving into the phase of waking up at 3 or 4am and struggling to go back to sleep. Yay! (Oy!)

Oh, quiet boring TV without commercials help to fall asleep, but still not a cure all.

3

Same here. I have it even worse, I often can’t fall asleep until 3 AM. It’s not because I’ve not tried going to bed earlier - if I go to bed at midnight, it usually just means I lie in bed awake until…well, 3 AM.

4

Similar to What_Exit wrote, I suggest redefining “later in the day”. At whatever point you are currently stopping your caffeine intake, reset it to 3-4 hours earlier, and see if that helps.

5

That would literally be before I wake up. If I’m up at 7:30, I’m done coffee by 9.

6

Fifteen years ago I started with the sleep anxiety thing. I was anxious I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep so the anxiety kept me awake. Now I take an anti anxiety pill before bed. There are nights I don’t fall asleep til a few hours past my normal bedtime, but I don’t care. I no longer worry about not being able to sleep.

7

Have you always been this way, or is this a change?

Is it a some-nights thing or an every-night thing?

8

Try eating an early supper, and not eating anything after 7pm. Often eating later at night will prevent the body from settling down.

9

People have chronotypes that affect their circadian rhythm. Larks are people who naturally wake early and Owls are people who naturally wake late. It’s very hard to change your chronotype and taking jobs in opposition to your chronotype is linked to a number of long term health problems.

10

I finally gave up and started drinking decaf only. I think it helped. Also, my wife and I have dinner around 1 or 2 and don’t eat till next morning.

Maybe I should record and send you one of my lectures. It used to work for my classes.

11

A sleep specialist might be helpful. Here are some things that have impacted my sleep over the years. For the record, I am a 56 y.o. female in the final stages of perimenopause.

  • In my 20s I worked out a lot, and physical exhaustion put me to sleep at night. When I stopped training, anxiety took over.
  • Alcohol consumed in the early evening would cause a crash at bedtime, but sometimes a 3am jolt awake. More recently, too much drinking has lead to night sweats. Probably the alcohol was metabolized into sugar.
  • Fasting followed by a big meal, plus wine, leads to food coma, a form of “sleep”. However too much eating late at night is a way to stay awake, and also to gain weight.
  • NyQuil will drop me off a cliff and help me sleep all night, but doesn’t work if I’m too stressed.
  • Melatonin will put me to sleep if I’m not too stressed, but I wake up again 2 hours later.
  • In my mid 40s I started waking up in a panic over nothing, every morning at 4am. That continues now, I just wake all the way up, make a to-do list in my head, and go back to sleep.
  • Other perimenopausal women haver reported lighter sleep at that time in their lives. I think OP is male but hey, men have hormones too.
  • Perimenopause also associated with those ever-fun hot flashes and night sweats.
  • Unresolved trauma can surface years later and cause anxiety and sometimes interrupted sleep. No evidence that OP has this, just putting it out there.
  • Life stresses in general, or prolonged stress – especially if it’s caused by real dread, like an unsafe living situation, will definitely impact sleep. Sometimes life can appear calm but something’s not right underneath.
  • Too much computer viewing at bedtime is supposedly bad. Bluish light. Yellow light and a bedside paperback, might be better.
  • I’m very sensitive to noise, both deep booms and little gadgetty beeps. Smells, too, sometimes.
  • Apparently humans are sometimes up at night, even in “primitive” societies without artificial lighting. Now, the moon will wake me up.
  • Some humans are just night owls or become so. I was always a lark, up with the sun… but, it is still hard for me to get up on a regular basis before sunrise. When I was getting up at 430am to get to work by 6 (so I’d have 2 hours peace and quiet to do actual work before all hell broke loose) I was constantly tired and didn’t fully adjust. So maybe this is just your clock and you will just have to bear it, or find a way to nap in the daytime.
  • Think about nutrition and food intake. Sugars and carbs, protein, all that stuff. A good nutritionist or sleep specialist might know more.
  • When I have insomnia, I can’t necessarily get up and do anything. So it’s not productive. I just lie there and play games in my head. There’s a sleep script I sometimes use, which apparently does not work on hard core insomniacs.
  • Cannabis edibles, combined with food and wine = total food coma. Sounds like you want natural sleep, and this ain’t it.

I’m sure I missed stuff.

12

But what about cannabis combined with some food and no alcohol? I mean that sounds like a more measured way to relax.

13

That works very well for some people. I would prefer all-natural solutions (exercise and nutrition) because too many drugs = more drugs to deal with the effects of the first drugs. Like caffeine in the morning and then a sleeping pill at night.

BTW - I cannot live without my morning coffee, but a second cup is fatal to sleep later on. So I don’t practice what I preach.

I forgot to note Ambien, which I’ve never taken. It seems to have bad side effects like sleep-eating, really bad air sickness, oblivion even if your house is on fire, and Roseanne’s famous Ambien tweet that got her fired from her own show.

14

I’ll share my sleep script here in case anyone wants to try it. I first encountered this during a therapy session as a troubled teen, and my therapist tried this to relax me. It put me to sleep! Probably good for self hypnosis too. So what you do is, say this to yourself, at measured intervals. Slow breathing, a statement every other breath.

Think of the space between your eyes.
Think of the space between your eyes, and the tip of your nose.
Think of the space between the tip of your nose, and your upper lip.
… upper lip and lower lip
… chin and top of head
… temples
… ears

etc. It might be important to keep the wording of “Think of the space…” and use the word “your”.

It doesn’t always work to put me to sleep, but it keeps my mind occupied. There’s another visualization where you descend in an elevator from the 10th floor to the basement. And another that associates numbers with colors, as in 10 is red, 9 is orange. These don’t work with hard-core insomniacs, though. They’re actually used for trancework sometimes. But go ahead and try it, what the heck.

15

Every damn day of my life… except when I was on vacation in New Zealand, and for the first time in my life, my internal clock was in synch with the world. It was a week of bliss!

I’ve started taking Melatonin (yes, I know, wooo, but it works) and I’ve found if I take it 60 minutes before bedtime, it helps me get to sleep. It doesn’t PUT me to sleep, just allows the sleep-state to start easier.

Every time I go on a stay-at-home vacation, I rapidly become nocturnal, going to bed at 3 a.m., getting up around noon-1, and its wonderful.

Yes, I’ve tried the no-caffeine thing, the exercise thing, the meditation thing, you name it I’ve tried it. My natural rhythm is just to go to bed at 2-3, and get up at noon-1.

Once I retire, I never hope to see 8 a.m. again :).

16

Not always, only in the last few months. Every single night, it’s never different.

17

That would suggest to me that skipping it entirely for a bit might help.

The point is to disrupt the pattern. Your body has decided that 2 AM is the time to sleep, so it does. There are various ways to disrupt it, and messing with caffeine is a fairly simple one.

A more difficult one I’ve used successfully if I have the time is to gradually go to bed later each night, and letting it rap back around. Or, if you want to try hard mode, just stay up as long as you can, perhaps even until evening the next night, when you then go to bed.

There’s also all the sleep hygiene stuff, too, but, ultimately, it’s about setting a new pattern.

18

Do you mind if I ask what the anti-anxiety med is?

I’ve been staying awake later and later…these days I’m awake until 7 am. :frowning: If I go to bed earlier, I just lie there wide awake. And staying up 24 hours straight or longer doesn’t reset my rhythms either.

19

I think this is a form of meditation lite, but when I wake up to pee in the middle of the night, I count my breaths. I find it virtually impossible to count up to 100 breaths. My mind starts to wander, but almost always do fall back asleep. Anyway, it cannot hurt.

20

I was insomniac as a child, a teen and a young adult.
I’ve never slept well.

When my kids were small I should’ve been able to sleep when they slept. Nope.

I’ve tried all the sleep aids.
I can’t do alcohol or weed.

Ambien was a disaster in me.
Some folks swear by it, tho’.
If I were you I’d try it. Call your doctor.
Especially since your sleeplessness is affecting your daily life.

I just quit fighting it. I just stay awake and do stuff.
I know that’s not possible for most people.