Try taking lowest dose melatonin like 5 hours before your bedtime, in addition to minimizing brightness and color temp of light sources. Don't worry if you wake up in the night for a while; read a paper book.
> Don't worry if you wake up in the night for a while
This is very good advice. I'm sure it varies from person to person, but anecdotally it seems to be completely natural to have a mid-sleep period of wakefulness (for a bathroom trip if nothing else).
If you start worrying that it will lower the overall quality of your sleep, it definitely will. But if you just go with it, lie still, at most read a book, you will get sleepy again in short order and continue your rest. In fact, personally I (paradoxically) seem to feel more rested on the nights that I had a more noticeable/awake mid-sleep hiatus (and without spending extra time asleep).
YMMV, of course; the point is not to let a completely benign occurrence turn into tossing and turning and watching the clock because you're anxious about getting enough sleep.
Set at least 2 alarms and get up. It's going to be rough for a short period, but you will adjust. There is really no trick. If you are so tired that you think you can't function (you can) do some jumping jacks and take a cold shower [1].
I started working at 6:30 this morning, and it's amazing. I watched the sun come up outside the window and I've had almost 3 solid hours of concentration time before the interruptions start.
[1] This all assumes you do not have some medical condition.
So for me, sleep and wake up times don't matter much. But for most people, if you want to optimize for one, don't worry about when you go to bed, worry about when you get up. Your body will naturally get tired at the right time each day based on your activity that day, as long as you avoid blue light and mental stimulation at night.
To get your body set to a wake up time, use an alarm clock for a while. As long as you're good about your nighttime light and stimulation habits, you'll find that after a month or two you don't need the alarm anymore.
If you're already using an alarm, then clean up your nighttime habits and see if that helps.
Note: This is all my opinion on reading a lot about this. I'm not a doctor and this stuff only applies to people with otherwise normal health. If you have a sleep disorder, all bets are off.
I just picked your post at somewhat random to contribute to this discussion, but it seemed like a relevant spot. Also not an advertisement, just an observation.
I've been adjusting my sleep patterns over the last week or two so that I'm getting up earlier (~5am). I started out just using the iOS Alarm Clock, but through the first week or two, it was pretty hit-and-miss. Some mornings I would get up at 5, some mornings I would apparently hit snooze a bunch of times in my groggy fog and not end up getting up until 7. This was happening on a somewhat subconscious level... I wasn't consciously hitting snooze, it was just that by time an alarm actually woke me up enough to realize what time it was, it was closer to 7.
A couple of years ago I had played with Pillow[1], and started trying it out again this week. The feature where it wakes you within a half hour of your set alarm, when it detects that you're in a lighter phase of sleep... It really seems to be helping. I've nailed the 5am wake up all week and have woken up feeling quite refreshed. And like you suggest, my body is adapting and is now starting to make me feel sleepy earlier and I'm just naturally wanting to go bed.
One other thing I've noticed is that I start to feel a bit of a chill around the time I should be going to bed. It's a nice reminder if I actually pay attention to it. No clue if that has a real physiological basis or not, or if it's just some cue my body gives me.
Good on you for coming over the wake up early dark side...
To steal a common survival phrase - 2 is one, 1 is none. I set multiple alarms anytime I have to get up for something like a flight. Otherwise, I wake up between 6 and 7 naturally. If you're still struggling with feeling refreshed, the fix for that is working out in the morning.
Not very scientific, but Jocko Willink is a huge proponent of getting up early because that discipline sets the tone for the entire day of getting stuff done. I tend agree, but YMMV.
Funny enough, a re-listen of Extreme Ownership is partially the reason that I started getting up early; the discipline feels good, and I'll probably start to add a light workout to it too.
The real reason is more practical though. Working on a side project, and with a partner and animals, it's been hard to get things done in the evenings. She doesn't get up with me when I get up early, so I've got a couple of undisturbed hours to grind on the project. Plus, it feels really damned good to have a feeling of accomplishment every morning before heading to the office; no matter how many useless meetings and stupid shit happens, I've already move the needle on something!
That's great! I don't know if Jocko is for everyone, but for me he's super motivating. I think we all are sometimes guilty of looking for complicated answers to motivation, discipline, and generally things that are hard (I know I am), but more often than not the answer is a simple 'get after it'.
Not OP but my tip is to take a weekend or some other time without obligations and stay up 1-4 hours later each night until you have rotated around to the correct schedule.
The other way is to develop a sleep debt until you can sleep at your desired time, and set an alarm to prevent yourself from oversleeping and falling back in to your normal routine. This will also lose you time out of your normal schedule, and is pretty terrible-feeling to boot, but it doesn't require quite as long.
Sleep physicians or sleep therapists are good about setting this kind of stuff up, if you have reasonable and inexpensive access to medical help.
Pick up an eighth of some top shelf indica, start loading bowls around 8-9pm, and keep loading it until you are asleep. Source: last night. Disclaimer: legalized in CA.
This might sound obvious and you might have tried a lot of these already, but for me what works in similar situation is that if it crosses 4, I skip sleep that day. And having a strict wake-up time works. Of course as the parent comment suggests, the night light played an important role. I have three different lights near my bed, each less intense. Also having dinner early, cold showers before sleep and no exercises at least two hours before.
Decide at what time you would like to wake up. So if you're trying to go to bed at 10, and get 8 hours of sleep, then set your alarm to 6 or 6.30AM (depends on how long it takes you to fall asleep). It's gonna suck for the first few days but eventually you'll be so tired that you'll start going to bed earlier, eventually reaching your goal. There might be more subtle methods, but this is what I do.
This only works if you can actually wake up with a low amount of sleep. I put one of those alarms on my phone where you have to solve maths problems to turn it off. All I've managed to do so far is train myself to do maths in my sleep...
I did the same thing. It got to the point where I had to set it to about 5 snoozes of 3 hard math problems then a final 5 problem set.
It worked for a few months, but eventually I began just hard powering down the phone and falling back asleep for hours.
Needless to say, I have never been successful at any job or school where I wasn't able to work afternoons or nights. I don't even bother applying for jobs that do a typical 9-5.
It has kind of set my life on a strange course.
And it's now almost 7am, I haven't slept, and I will probably end up staying up all day...
Surely this is primarily a question of willpower. Before you go to bed, commit to this action: when the alarm goes off, I will immediately get up. It quickly becomes habit.
When sleep schedule is completely broken, 20mn sport just after wake up in the morning is a good way to fix it. Normally, 10 days of regular schedule with sport in the morning is enough. You can stop sport after if you do not like it.
reacweb may not be a native English speaker (they live in France). I'd assume "sport" translates to "exercise". Like running or biking.
Sport has plenty of (somewhat archaic) meanings. "Sporting goods" stores often carry running shoes, bicycles, and weights, all of which are "sport" even if you're doing it by yourself.