Experts explain all the reasons why it’s hard to wake up in the morning, so you can show up to the line on time on race day.
Not everyone is a morning person, but if you often have a hard time waking up in the early a.m. hours or waking up feeling unrefreshed, it could pose a problem, especially if you have an upcoming morning race on your calendar.
Exercise like running can help improve your sleep quality and quantity, but that isn’t an automatic benefit, especially if you’re trying to cram all of your work, school, family, training, and sleep demands into just 24 hours. If anything, being a runner means you need to prioritize your sleep.
If you have a hard time waking up in the morning, it could signal you need to shift your lifestyle habits or it could mean something more serious. Here are a few reasons why you may be constantly hitting the snooze button every morning and what you can do about it.
Reasons Why It’s Hard to Wake Up in the Morning
Sleep Loss
“Whenever someone wakes up in the morning and they’re not refreshed from their sleep, it could really be a duration issue, and it could also be a quality issue,” says Matthew Silvis, M.D., the director of sports medicine at Penn State Health. While you should focus on how much sleep you’re getting each night—at least meet the National Sleep Foundation’s (NSF) recommendation of seven to nine hours per night for adults—it’s important to consider the quality when it comes to your personal sleep needs, says Silvis.
The NSF website states the seven- to nine-hour rule is just a general recommendation and you may need more sleep depending on your age and lifestyle. For example, if you’re training for a long distance race you may need more shuteye.
“Any sort of strenuous physical activity essentially forces our body to want to repair itself. We’re either trying to grow muscle or grow stamina, and that happens during sleep, particularly during slow wave sleep, which is our deepest sleep,” Joseph Schellenberg, M.D., a pulmonologist at the Lehigh Valley Health Network tells Runner’s World. This stage of sleep occurs multiple times throughout a good night’s sleep. But if you sleep for six hours or less, there’s a chance you’re not getting enough of this restorative type of sleep for your body to fully recover from training, he explains.
This disrupts more than just your ability to wake up on time. Whether you’re acutely sleep deprived—you missed out on just one night of quality sleep—or chronically sleep deprived, —meaning you consistently don’t get enough—it can affect your ability to function the entire next day, says Schellenberg.
Overtraining
When a runner engages in excessive or intense training without proper rest and recovery, it could lead to overtraining.
For runners with overtraining syndrome, sleep is one of the first things to get disrupted, says Philip Skiba, M.D., director of the Jefferson Sports Medicine Fellowship at Thomas Jefferson University. A higher training load requires more of a time commitment, and you wake up earlier to train may experience trouble, especially if you didn’t get the proper rest you needed, he explains. This is why you need to shift your schedule—getting to bed earlier and winding down without devices nearby—to make more time for sleep as your training increases.
Sleep Disruptions
Sleep disruptions can show up in a variety of ways throughout your training.
For example, if you’re overtraining and not recovering after workouts, you put yourself at risk for running related injuries like stress fractures or plantar fasciitis. In the event you’re injured, the aches and pains associated with that injury may disrupt your sleep at night so you likely won’t get the quality sleep you need, says Schellenberg.
Not to mention if you have a newborn, toddler, or even a pet that may disrupt your sleep in the middle of the night.
Frequent bathroom trips in the middle of the night can disrupt your restorative sleep too. This is why Silvis recommends you avoid drinking too much fluids before bed.
Caffeine Intake
Consuming caffeine (not just coffee and soda, but gels too) after noontime can cause you to have trouble waking up the next morning, says Skiba.
Research confirms this: A small double-blinded study published in the journal Nutrients in 2019 found consuming caffeine in the evening can impair sleep quality in runners specifically. During the study, 15 trained male runners consumed either a placebo or caffeine supplement at 7 p.m. approximately one hour before completing a 800-meter trial test. Researchers then analyzed the effects of caffeine on performance, sleep quality, and the heart during sleep. Sleep quality, calm sleep, and waking up feeling refreshed was also assessed via a questionnaire. This process was repeated again the next day.
The study found consuming the caffeine supplement didn’t improve run performance, and it impaired sleep efficiency, wake time, and the number of awakenings. Also it found caffeine likely impaired the ease of falling asleep, sleep quality, calm sleep, and most importantly, feeling refreshed after waking. This is more a reason to cut back on the caffeine closer to bedtime.
Changes to Your Circadian Rhythm
Particularly, if you’re traveling across time zones. It’s more problematic to travel east than it is west, says Silvis. If you travel eastward, your exposure to daylight is shortened, which can make it harder for some runners to fall asleep at night and to wake up in the morning, he adds.
Also, your work schedule may be to blame, especially if you have a varying schedule that requires you to work nights and days consecutively or if you exercise before bed, says Skiba. In general exercise raises your body temperature, so if you run a few hours before bed this can make it harder for you to fall asleep at night, which can result in you not getting enough sleep and morning grogginess.
Medication
Certain sedating medications that can cause drowsiness in general, like allergy medications or beta blockers (typically used to control high blood pressure), can cause you to have a hard time waking up in the morning, says Skiba. This is why he recommends consulting with your primary care physician to identify and change any medications that may cause you to feel drowsy.
Sleep Disorders
If you have a solid bedtime routine and your sleep isn’t being disrupted by something out of your control like noise or going to the bathroom, then the source of your morning fog could be a sleep condition, for which you need to be tested for by a doctor, says Schellenberg. Here are the most common sleep conditions:
- Sleep Apnea: This common condition occurs when your airway is blocked repeatedly during sleep, which causes your breathing to stop for short amounts of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control website.
- Restless Legs: This condition causes a strong urge to move the legs typically at night when sitting or lying down, according to the Mayo Clinic.
- Narcolepsy: This neurological disorder affects the brains ability to control the sleep-wake cycle and is less common. However, people with narcolepsy tend to wake up feeling refreshed and experience fatigue throughout the day, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. This is likely because their brain doesn’t produce enough of a neurochemical that promotes wakefulness, says Schellenberg.
- Idiopathic Central Nervous System Hypersomnia (CNS): A rare condition that cause someone to feel very sleepy after having a full night’s rest, according to the Mayo Clinic.
How to Wake Yourself up in the Morning
Here are a few tips to help you get your day started particularly when you have trouble waking up in the morning.
1. Make Sure You Get Enough Sleep
As we mentioned earlier, the NSF recommends adults ages 18 to 64 sleep for anywhere from seven to nine hours each night, but as your training load increases you may need to get more zzz’s in order to fully recover.
This is why “you should give yourself the capacity to sleep longer,” says Silvis. This doesn’t mean you have to sleep for 10 hours on end, but as your training volume increases so should your sleep.
To better understand your sleep needs, Silvis recommends periodically checking your fatigue levels on a scale of one to 10 (the highest level of energy) throughout the day. If you find your energy level is consistently at the low end of the scale, this can indicate you need to get more rest.
2. Adjust Your Sleep Schedule
If you have plans to travel to a different time zone for a race, you’ll want to adjust your sleep schedule to that time zone either before you arrive or after, so you can avoid having a hard time waking up on race day.
Many experts, including Silvis, recommend arriving at your race location a day early for each time zone you cross. For example, if you’re traveling from California to New York City for the marathon you want to give yourself at least three days to adjust, says Silvis.
If you don’t have the opportunity to arrive early, then Silvis recommends implementing a sleep strategy that will account for the time change at least week before your race. You can pretend you’re already at your race destination, and go to bed based on that time zone rather than your local time, he says.
3. Avoid Snoozing
“If you’re waking up every nine minutes, chances are you’re not going back into any deeper restorative or REM sleep,” says Schellenberg. At that point, you’re really just moving into light sleep, which doesn’t have a significant benefit when you’re waking up in the morning, he explains. This is why he recommends you set your alarm to the time you want to wake up so you don’t have to hit snooze and you avoid going back to sleep.
4. Create a Good Sleep Environment
To create a good sleep environment, make sure your room temperature is set to anywhere from 65 to 70 degrees as research confirms bedroom temperatures can influence body temperature and sleep quality. More specifically, a study published in the journal SLEEP found for each degree increase in bedroom temperature between 60 – 85 degrees there was a .06 percent decrease in sleep efficiency after analyzing 3.75 million nights of sleep data.
Silvis echoes this and recommends you set your bedroom temperature to 65 degrees. Also you don’t want to have too many clothes on or too much bedding overtop of you because this can increase your body temperature, which can disrupt your sleep, he says.
Lastly, Skiba recommends sleeping in a dark room and that you reduce your screen time before hitting the sheets to improve your sleep quality, which will help you wake up feeling refreshed.
5. Get Active
Once you’re awake it’s important to start your daily routine immediately. As soon as you’re up, get to the brightest part of your house because that’s going to entrain your brain that the day is starting, says Schellenberg.
You can do this by opening the blinds to let in direct sunlight, which Schellenberg says is most effective or by going for a morning stroll, to which research shows can improve cognitive performance like decision making throughout the day.
