Early 60's, exercise daily including weight lifting and running. Decent (not great) diet. Drink too much coffee but limit myself to one diet soda per day.

I fight like hell to stay awake past 7 PM. If nothing is going on, I go ahead and go to bed.

Sleep like a rock until about 2 AM. Then I'm wide awake. Lie in bed trying to go back to sleep but usually cannot. So usually 6-7 hours of solid sleep. As you can see on the time stamp of this post - I've already been up a while.

So = I'm not complaining - BUT - when there are evenings when something is going on, I have a hell of a time staying up.

Suggestion on how to shift my sleep time later about two to three hours? My normal wake time needs to be 4 to 5 AM so I can get morning workouts in. But I ought to be able to stay up until 9 PM - AT LEAST - and still do that.

Thank you in advance.

Going to ask a few questions

1.) what's your water intake? One of the signs of dehydration is exhaustion. I find I drink water during the day but as the day goes on I cut down too much. I have had to remind myself to keep drinking water

2.) what's your nighttime routine. If I get bored/doing mind numbing stuff I get tired early. Take a look at that.

Is this seasonal because of the early sunset? Or year round?

Can get an artificial sunlight lamp and keep that on nearby until an hour before you want to sleep. Use some caffeine 6-10 hours before you intended bedtime. And maybe use melatonin to try going back to sleep at 2am.

It will take at least a week to make the adjustments. Can try pushing it 30 minutes each day till you're at where you want to be.

You are trying to treat Advanced Sleep Wake Phase Disorder which is common with increasing age (sorry).

In addition to doing everything you can to try to schedule your sleep properly, make sure you avoid naps, limit caffeine (caffeine has a very long half life), and get afternoon light. If you can't get afternoon light where you are and how you live (difficult this time of the year in the Northern hemisphere), you can purchase a light box. You need to aim for anywhere from 2,500 - 4,000 lux.

Additionally, there is some evidence that morning melatonin (recommend around 5 mg) can help delay your sleep wake phase. That being said, there is a recent association with long term use of melatonin and heart failure. It's as yet unclear as to whether it is causation or correlation. When I was but a pup we would stay with my grandparents who lived on a ranch. Every morning, their rooster would start crowing and it wasn't much afterwards that the sun would come up. My Dad tried to convince me that it was causation and not correlation, but I saw through that bull**** even at my tender age. My sister, not wise in the ways of reasoning, fell for it. But I digress.

For the insomnia part of the equation, try sleep restriction. Pick your desired wake time, and forbid yourself to get into bed until around 6 hours prior to that. No electronics in the room if you wake up, at MOST reading a pleasant book under dim light.

Cheers

Thanks for the suggestions. I will try some of these things. Especially the docs suggestions.

Yeah, it's dark by 5:30 -: this is the worst time of year for this.

If you prefer, and are maintaining morning workouts, I would consider adding an evening walk to your daily schedule. It doesn't have to be anything exhausting or real long, but if you are up and moving it's going to take some time at the end of the day to come down from that. If possible I would do that after dinner so you could start resting around an hour before you want to go to bed. It's been a while since I had a dog I could go on walks with, but when I did we went on 1-2 mile walks in the morning and at night and it was way better for keeping a good sleep schedule. An evening walk also won't tire you out to the point where it impacts your ability to exercise in the morning.

I thought about an evening walk. The dogs would like that. I also am not drinking nearly enough water. I'll try those two first.

Tried drinking water throughout the day. I normally do OK in the morning and don't drink a drop all afternoon. Stayed up until 8 PM and slept to 3:30 AM. I'll see if I can keep that up for a while.

Tonight is NYE, the worst night of the year for me. My wife knows better than to try and go out - maybe I can stretch it to 9 PM.

Melatonin can help but I prefer to stay off the stuff long term, right now I use it more than I should but sleep quality has been pretty good. You didn't mention alcohol but when I drank sometimes I would wake up early like that and I know a few other people. Sleep quality is so much better after I quit drinking.

No screens 60-90 minutes before bed, meditation helps (I used Headspace), or for me listening to a book I have listened to several times or the Bible helps me go back to sleep. I normally wake up around 4:45 and during some days off I have been doing this to get a few more hours of catch up sleep.

Odd as it sounds but I can tell when I don't take ZMA supplements before bed, sleep is just a little better. Most current Americans are deficient in zinc and magnesium anyways.

I tried the walk and in the summer I then wanted to shower. I now do stretching because I need it anyway.

Eat dinner later. Try for 6:30-7 and set bed time at 10. Pop a couple magnesium glycinate at 8:30.

I've dealt with this for years. I finally stopped fighting and now start work around 2 am most days, plus or minus an hour. It does help coordinate with the team that I lead that's in Asia.

you have an advanced sleep cycle

in theory, you would want to slowly correct that / normalize it, towards the "normal" sleep window (ie not 7p-2a) -- unless your current life/work dictates your sleep window


- would try to slowly correct the window (over wks)
- would ideally stop caffeine after ~2p
- would limit screen time ~1-2hr pre-bed
- would try to avoid melatonin -- I use this SleepSync
- melatonin supplementation can affect your glands reliance on supplementation and make it harder for you to make your own melatonin
- would likely get a home sleep test (something like Blackstone) to screen for OSA
[url=https://cerebraceuticals.com/pages/sleepsync][/url]

Still working on it. Thanks for the suggestions.

Right now, I'm staying up until 8 PM pretty much each day. But some days, like today, I still wake up at 2 AM.

The one suggestion that seems to have helped the most is spreading water intake throughout the day. I was always told by trainers it didn't matter when you drank your water, just as long as you got it in. So I was i the habit of getting my water intake done before lunch.

What's the board's consensus on whether a Kindle counts as a disruptive screen for quality sleep? I usually read that for 20-30 minutes before lights out.

Testosterone injections. Do it.

Scriffer said:

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What's the board's consensus on whether a Kindle counts as a disruptive screen for quality sleep? I usually read that for 20-30 minutes before lights out.

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An actual Kindle or Kindle Paperwhite model is fine as long as you are actually just reading on it. A Kindle Fire etc is actually a tablet - those don't count.