The Dreaded 3 AM Waking

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What's keeping you up at night? Hello, everyone. I'm Alanna McGinn, and this is the bedtime edit podcast. And today I'm going to be talking about what I hear from my clients the most, from my communities the most, and that is the 3am waking Why am I waking up at 3am and how do I fall back asleep? And this is an issue, a sleep issue, that plagues a lot of us, especially as we enter that midlife stage. So a big part of this podcast, as you know, is I want to hear from you. I want to hear your personal stories. I want you guys to contribute to this podcast, whether it be anonymously, whether you come on the podcast with me, and there's a few ways you can do that, and that is through sending me DMS through my social you can head over to at the bedtime edit. And a few of you did that because I did put a call out, and I said, What happens when you wake up at 3am and this is what a few of you wrote to me. So one of the messages that I got back said, I typically wake up between three to 5am and my mind starts planning for the next day and I can't fall asleep. Another said, my thoughts move to work, the things I didn't get done, things around the house that need to be done, bad foods I ate that day, exercise I didn't do. And eventually I get up to pee, back to bed, and then repeat. And somebody also said, I can be awake for one to two hours. My mind wanders and I can't turn it off. So Does this sound familiar, right? We are all waking at that 3am Mark. It is hard to fall back asleep. You start tossing, you start turning, you start clock watching. And there's a few reasons for that. There's I'm gonna go through some of the five Top Common reasons why we wake up at 3am and how to handle that waking in order to fall back asleep. So today we're gonna dive into five of the most common reasons why we wake up at 3am and in later episodes, I'll dive a little bit deeper into certain topics. But today, let's just get down into it. So I think the first thing that we need to understand is waking up at 3am is common, and it's not typically an issue, provided you can fall back asleep. So if you do wake up at 3am it doesn't mean you have sleep issues. It doesn't mean you have insomnia, because often when we paint ourselves in that direction now we're feeling stress and anxiety about not sleeping well, we're wondering why we keep waking up. If you can fall back asleep in around 10 or 15 minutes of waking up, you're good to go. It's not something you need to worry about, because let's look back to our ancestors right back in the day, sleep was done in two segments. There would be sleep time. Number one, they would sleep for a bit. They would wake up. They would do things, chores around the house, and do things, and then they would go back to bed for sleep. Number two, but as we entered modern age, as there was more gas lighting, enter iPhones, enter screens, our work days got later and later, our bedtimes got later and later, and we weren't able to segment our sleep in different intervals, because we had to consolidate it all into those seven to eight hours. So sleeping in segments is not as uncommon as you might think. Also, if we can go back, we're talking about our ancestors. Let's really get in there, if you're listening to this and you're a mom, you know the witching hour, right? The witching hour really was the time when we had our little babies and they were awake from nap time to bedtime. It was that witching hour time around that 4pm time where everything went crazy and babies started wailing, and it could be a really hard time for new parents. But the witching hour actually came into effect in the Catholic Church in the year 1535, and they deemed the witching hour as three to 4am and they didn't want anyone doing any activities between three to 4am because it was deemed as the time of witchcraft, which is where the term witching hour came from. So again, we're going back to 1535, those three to 4am wakings were happening even back then. So if we look at a cycle of sleep, each cycle of sleep is 90 minutes, and we have about five or six cycles throughout the night. In each cycle of sleep, we transition through different stages of sleep, from light sleep to deep sleep in the earlier hours of the night. So about four to five hours of falling asleep in that time frame, we have longer periods of deeper sleep. So to transition into that next cycle of sleep, it doesn't it's not as hard, it's not as hard to get into that next cycle of sleep. But as we get further down the night, so we're getting closer to 3am and 4am that stage of deeper sleep becomes shorter, and now we have longer stages of lighter sleep. So we tend to wake up a little bit more when we're transitioning through different cycles of sleep, so when we are more stressed out, when we. Have a lot more on our mind when we're maybe going through some things, or we're not feeling as well, or we have to get up to go pee, at that 3am Mark, we tend to wake up more fully, and it could be harder to fall asleep. So the reason why I'm explaining this is because, just to show you that that 3am waking is common, it could be for natural reasons. But there also could be other reasons why you're waking up at 3am and that's what we're going to get into right now. So the first reason why you might be waking up at 3am is low blood sugar. Hypoglycemia is often a culprit of that 3am waking so what happens when we're trying to sleep is our liver is working very hard on metabolizing glucose. So if you have dinner and you stop eating at about five or six o'clock at night, and then you're not eating again until breakfast. Throughout that time, you can get a dip in your blood sugar. When we have that dip in blood sugar, our adrenal glands start to release cortisol. Cortisol is our stress hormone. It's what naturally starts to wake up our body. When Cortisol is released, it suppresses our melatonin. So not only does this wake us up, but also what cortisol does is it doesn't allow us the ability to to calm the mind and relax the body. So we're waking up at that 3am Mark, because perhaps our blood sugar levels have dipped and our cortisol levels are rising, and if we're already in a kind of a stressed out state of mind, we're having difficulties calming our mind and relaxing our bodies in order to fall back asleep. So we've got to stabilize that blood sugar. So if you find that that's the reason why you're waking up at 3am things that you can do is have maybe a little bedtime snack. Focusing on protein. Protein is a common topic in in midlife, proteins and fibers, right? So things like raw pumpkin seeds, a little bit of grain toast with peanut butter, maybe some chickpeas, some hummus and crackers, something light. Think again. Natural Foods, complex carbs, something light. Before you go to bed, you want to avoid those big meals we don't want. We don't want our body busy digesting food while we're trying to focus on quality sleep, but a little snack can help stabilize those blood sugars, to avoid that dip and that 3am waking another reason why we might wake up at 3am is you gotta pee. Right? If you gotta pee, you gotta pee. And as you get older, our bladders might become a little bit weaker and we might have a little bit more middle of the night bathroom breaks than maybe perhaps that we would like ways to avoid this, obviously, is to monitor your fluid intake. I know for me, this time of year, in the winter, I am a herbal tea drinker. That's kind of my water intake. I also try and drink my water, but it can be so hard. But if I'm like pounding water and tea at night, I'm guaranteed at least one bathroom break, if not two, throughout the night. So I really try and monitor one cup of tea after dinner, maybe a little bit of water before I go to bed, and that's it. And just monitor my fluids. Now if you do have to get up and go to the bathroom throughout the night. Please do so, because it's very difficult to sleep on a full bladder. But monitor your lights so don't turn on every lights. It only takes seven minutes of light exposure to start to suppress your melatonin. So if you have to keep the area in which you're walking to your bathroom lit. Focus on the colors of light and the tone of light that is going to be on while you're going to the bathroom, stay away. It's hard to stay away from like LED lights right now, and unfortunately, a lot of them are white lights and blue lights, which, again, is going to kind of turn that sleep switch off in your brain and suppress that melatonin. So focusing on more warmer tones, think reds, yellows, oranges, but try and minimize that that the light as much as you can. When you do get into bed, and if you find that you're kind of tossing and turning, don't look at the clock. Clock watching is probably the biggest sleep sabotager In the bedroom. So whether you use your phone as your alarm clock, whether you use your whether you use an actual alarm clock, all you have to do is trust that your alarm is set. Turn your phone upside down, turn the clock away from you. You don't need to look at the time, because what happens when we start clock watching?

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We're all guilty of it, right? We start doing the countdown if I go to bed now get four hours if I go to bed. Now get three hours if I go to bed. Now get two hours. And that just heightens any stress or anxiety you might already be feeling about not sleeping well. So trust your alarm is going to go off. The only time you need to be worried about is that it's time to go back to sleep. If you're doing all the right steps, you've gone to the bathroom, you're in low light, you turn your clock or. And you're still really struggling to fall asleep, this is where you can focus on things like visualization, breathing exercises to help you fall asleep. A great quick visual a great quick visualization activity is visualize yourself doing something that you enjoy. Super simple, right? What makes you happy if you are a sports player, if you're a golfer, if you're a basketball player, visualize yourself playing these sports and killing it right, getting all those hole in ones and baskets and all those things I'm not a sports person. If you are a baker, picture yourself baking a cake or making a delicious meal, doing a craft you love to do. So visualize yourself in a happy place. It could be just walking on the beach. Could be swinging on a hammock. We all do that really well, and we all really enjoy doing it. Breathing exercise, a really quick breathing exercise, is the 478 breathing exercise. So this is where you would breathe in for four seconds, hold it for seven and breathe out for eight, and do that about two or three times. I'm a huge proponent of breathing activities. Again, this is a topic I will dive into more into later episodes. But studies show simple breathing activities, and there's a lot of different ones. Find one that works best for you. There are studies that show that simple breathing exercises can lower your blood pressure, calm your body and mind down, and then, in turn, help you fall asleep. The third reason why you might be waking up at 3am is you're too hot or you're too cold. Body temperature matters when you are sleeping, because when we are trying to fall asleep the most, or when we are trying to sleep, the most important thing we want to our body to focus on is just that sleeping. So this is why we want to avoid, you know, eating a big meal. We don't want our body busy working digesting all that food. This is why we want to focus on the right temperature, because we don't want our body busy regulating its temperature when we are trying to get a good night of sleep. So what kind of sleep are you? Are you hot sleeper? Are you a cold sleeper? That's the first thing to identify. Always identify. What are your sleep needs for the night? If you are a hot sleeper, and let's be honest, if you are a woman and you are a midlife that is probably the case. I know that is the case for me. Lately, I'm going through the night sweats. I've always been a natural hot sleeper. I always tend to run hot at night, so what I sleep in and what I sleep on and have over me matters, and that can change seasonally. Your bedding is going to change according to the seasons, but it's also going to change according to your personal sleep needs. An ideal temperature, we all sleep better in a cooler environment. An ideal temperature is anywhere about you're looking at about 65 to 72 degrees, again, depending on your sleep needs and what you're sleeping with in bed is dependent on you, not necessarily the person sleeping beside you, because they might not be a hot sleeper. If you are one, they might be a cold sleeper. I can't tell you how many marriages I've saved just by telling people to use separate blankets, right? If you need a lighter duvet, if you need a lighter blanket, whereas your partner is more of a cool sleeper and needs those flannels in the middle of the winter, it's okay to have separate blankets. So focusing on layering your bedding, sheets, quilts, duvet, so you can peel off if you need to throughout the night. Also, what are you sleeping in? Focusing on if you are a hot sleeper, focusing on natural fibers. So think cotton's bamboo wicking fabrics. A lot of people will automatically assume that Sleeping Naked is the best way to stay cool while you're sleeping. But here's the thing, if you are a natural hot sleeper, a natural night sweater. If you are a woman in midlife and you are going through night sweats, you're going to sweat regardless. So now you're sleeping naked and you are sweating, and where is all that sweat going on your bedding? And now you're sleeping in a pool of your sweat, which does not promote a very comfortable environment does not promote a great night of sleep. So this is why you're also you're almost better off focusing on pajamas where you can that will help wick away that perspiration and hold that perspiration. Actually, a lot of pajamas now are even being made with like performance fleece material, same as like workout clothes, so again, pulling away that perspiration so that you're not sleeping in like a hot, sticky mess, which is never fun. Another reason, our fourth reason why we tend to wake up at 3am is we haven't managed our stress levels throughout the day. A lot of the topics that we are going to be talking about on the bedtime edit is five. Things that we can do throughout the day that, in turn, are going to help us sleep better, things that we can do in the morning that are going to help us sleep better at night. And a big part of that, and I'm probably going to be talking about constructive worry a lot on this episode, because it's something I practice often, something I get my clients to practice often, is we have to learn to manage our stress levels throughout the day so that we're not bringing them into the bedroom at night. Because what happens when we are going through our day? We are so easily distracted with life, with family, with work, we can push all those worries, all those concerns, down, down, down, not work through them, not really think about them, not give them much thought, and then we go to bed at night, and all those distractions are gone. And now what's flooding our brain is flooding our brain at bedtime, and it's flooding our brain when we're waking up at that 3am Mark, because remember, we have shorter durations of deeper states of sleep in that cycle of sleep. Remember when I said that earlier? So this is where it applies. So we need to start managing that stress and working through what maybe is going through our brain throughout the day. So we're not doing it at night. Also, if you're in a more stressful time in your life, and we all have episodes of that time, right? You're just going through a more anxious time, a more worrisome time you have, you know, bigger issues to work out that perhaps you didn't have last month or last year, your cortisol levels perhaps could be higher than usual throughout the day. So we all have a certain, again, a certain baseline of where our cortisol will rise throughout the day. If we are in a more stressful time in our life, it's going to surpass that, and it's going to be even higher. And the problem comes is now we're going into bedtime, and as we're going into bedtime, our melatonin is released, our cortisol levels are suppressed, but if our cortisol levels are higher than usual, we're not able to get that proper balance and get enough melatonin released to

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aid in a good night of sleep at night. So again, working on managing that stress level throughout the day is important. So a great way to do that. It's something that I've talked about before, it's something that I'm going to talk about again, is called what I call a productive thought, or constructive worry. This is very simple exercise. You can do it however you like, but a very simple way of doing it is just getting a white sheet of paper or a notepad. I will say there is always something to be said about pen to paper, rather than writing it in your notes, on your phone, rather than just sending yourself an email, put it down on paper. Draw a line in the middle. On one side, you're writing out your problems. We all have problems, right? We all have we could have numerous amounts of problems in a day, but what is that one that you know is going to keep you up at 3am that's a problem that you want to slap down on that piece of paper, and then on the other side of the paper, you take a minute or two a day. That's all you need. You don't have to spend a lot of time, but you need to give yourself that time to stress out, start writing down those solutions to that problem. So a solution could be something simple. You don't have to solve it in that moment, but what are some steps that you can start taking to solve that problem? So maybe it's making an appointment with somebody, it's finding out more research on something, it's sourcing out a product or a service. It's having a conversation with somebody, working out anything, start writing it down. Fold that piece of paper and put it away. Put it away, knowing that tomorrow, around the same time, for around the same amount of time, you're going to take that piece of paper out and start writing out more solutions to that problem. So you go to bed at night, that problem is going to pop into your head. It is, we're human. I can't I'm not going to tell you to not stress out at night or not have those worries and those concerns flipped your brain because we're human, and it's what we do, it's what happens, it's what naturally happens. But now you can start saying to yourself, I thought about it today. I worked through it today. I know I'm going to work through it tomorrow. Now is not the time to do it. And the more you say that to yourself, and the more you practice that approach, the easier it will be to not sit there and ruminate on it at 3am in the middle of the night. So again, focusing on a lot of what we do throughout the day is going to help us fall asleep a lot easier at 3am and the fifth reason why we are waking up at 3am and probably one of my favorite reasons to work on with the client, because it's one that is like super simple and is often overlooked, is you are simply going to bed too early. So if we look at your bedtime, a lot of people will choose a nine to 10pm bedtime because they just feel that that's an appropriate bedtime, right? That's just when people tend to go to bed. But we need to factor in first of all, what is your wait time in your morning? Your wait time in your more in the morning is dictated by your life that. Going to dictate what your bedtime is. So on average, if we're looking at those seven to eight hours of sleep, you could be a six hour sleeper. You could be a nine hour sleeper. It's always a good six to nine hours is kind of a good range to focus on. What time you have to wake up in the morning. That's where you set your bedtime. So if you don't have to wake up till, say, six or seven to start getting ready for work, and you're going to bed at nine or 10 because you feel like that's relatively a good bedtime, but you only need six hours of sleep per night. Where's that taking you? Right? We can do the math for going to bed at nine o'clock. That's your body naturally waking up at 3am and it's like I've had enough sleep, or if you're going to bed at 10 o'clock, you're waking up at 4am I've had enough sleep, and then we're wondering why we're not able to fall back asleep at that time. So when I start working with clients, or when I'm speaking to my communities, a lot of them will think that I'll be telling them to go to bed earlier, that they're going to bed too late, but actually, for most of the time. I'm actually encouraging you to perhaps go to bed a bit later. And a way that you can determine this is simply logging your sleep. Log your sleep for maybe a week, maybe two weeks. What time are you going to bed? And then What time are you actually falling asleep at night after night? Now not if you're going to bed and like surfing Tiktok and doing all that stuff, but if you're going to bed and actively trying to fall asleep, and you're going to bed at nine, and your body's not really falling asleep till 11, and this is happening for a week or two pretty consistently. That tells me that perhaps you should be moving your bedtime out to 11. So earlier bedtime isn't always a solution. Sometimes the solution is actually going to bed a little bit later. So those are my five most common reasons why we tend to wake up at 3am I didn't even get into perimenopause and menopause and hormones and all of those things that will be a later topic on later episodes, but those are reasons that I see within my communities and clients as reasons why that 3am waking is happening, and hopefully some of those tips help you alleviate some of those wakings and fall back asleep a lot easier when you do wake up at 3am because remember, it's okay to Wake up at 3am provided you can fall back asleep. So take that pressure off right there. So as I mentioned, a lot of these topics that I talked about are common reasons why we're waking up at 3am talked a lot about stress, right? Stress is a big one. And again, when I'm working with clients, I'm working on sleep and stress management, because they go hand in hand, we're gonna stress out. We're gonna have stress in our life. It's going to affect how we go to bed at night. So that is going to be an episode that we are going to have later this year talking about whether stress is good or bad, how to identify the good stress versus the bad stress. What do we have to work on and at the end of the day, how to help us fall asleep a lot easier at night. Today, we talked a lot about what's keeping you up in the middle of the night and not allowing you to fall asleep. And on a future episode, I'm going to really dive into how to fall asleep at bedtime, because I know a lot of you are struggling with that. In the meantime, what's keeping you up at night? I want to hear about it, and I want to know about it, until then, see you soon. Find new episodes of the bedtime edit every other Monday, follow and subscribe on Apple podcast, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.