As important as the time we go to sleep matters when we choose to rise up from bed can also impact our health either positively or negatively.
Some people’s choice of time to wake up is influenced by their careers or responsibilities, others make their choice from a place of health benefit, personal habit, or learned habit. That said, I’ll be answering one of the common questions I encounter, is waking up at 4 am healthy?
Is waking up at 4 am healthy? People call 4 am the time billionaires wake up. While this is not the reality for everyone, it is also not entirely wrong.
There are quite a lot of reasons behind the assumption that 4 am is the waking-up time for billionaires. Some true, others not. People give varying reasons for rising early. But is 4 am a healthy time to wake up? Read more to find out.
Why Is Waking At 4 am Bad
Ever since some of the most successful people in the world made comments about them waking up around 4 a.m, there’s been a common standard of it being one of the best times to wake.
Most notably is Apple CEO Tim Cook, who may have started the whole discussion when he stated that he wakes up at 3:45 a.m. to read through user comments and other similar information.
However, other successful people who have given it a try as well have expressed contrary opinions about their experiences. This explains the fact that people experience their strokes in different ways.
Firstly, you should always consider the time you sleep to measure when you wake up. Studies have shown that an average adult should get at least 6 to 8 hours of sleep. Sleep researcher Dan Gartenberg explained that there’s a need for us to spend eight and a half hours sleeping each night.
So if the number of hours you sleep does not amount to 6-8 hours when you wake by 4 am, then it’s a bad choice, to begin with. But apart from all these, there are a few other reasons why waking up at 4 am can be bad for you. Here are some.
1. Missing Out On Certain Self-Care Events
As healthy as it might be to sleep early, it can also make you miss out on some events. From hanging out with friends, finishing some work, catching up with people on social media to movies, and self-care time, waking up by 4 am might rob you of certain things that can be done with more time if you decide to wake up later than that.
In a small Harvard study, deductions were shown that it doesn’t matter whether you go to bed late and rise during an early or late hour, the consistency in what you do is what counts.
Incidentally, in this same study, it was found that people perform better if they get some sleep during “nighttime hours,” which is to say between 10 p.m. and 10 a.m. So if you decide to wake up around 4 am, that means 6 hours of sleep which isn’t the most healthy thing to do.
So in light of all these, waking up at 4 a.m hinders you from making a variety of healthy choices on when to sleep and more, deters you from engaging in events that are important for your physical and mental well-being.
2. Exhaustion
While for some people, they need to wake up by 4 am, others don’t get a choice in doing this. They just find themselves waking up by then and they contemplate whether they should sleep or not.
However, if you do not have a healthy dose of sleep, it can cause you to get exhausted before completing the activities you have planned for the day thereby affecting your daily productivity and performance.
Apart from this, waking up too early can cause a ripple of afternoon naps and difficulty in sleeping later during the night.
It can also make you consume unhealthy foods such as excessive snacks or drinking energy drinks just to stay awake during the day, all of which can hurt your health.
Other consequences include heightened stress and sleep deprivation. These too have bad impacts on your health and life.
So, if you have the habit of rising early, you might want to be certain it is not affecting your daily routine or putting you in a rather difficult position.
Why Do Billionaires Wake Up By 4 am?
In an article on Wall Street Journal, an interview with several billionaires showed that they all seem to find 4 a.m as their “most productive time of the day”.
The group of people these discoveries were made from included: Richard Branson (CEO of Virgin Atlantic) Tim Cook (CEO of Apple), Michelle Grass (Former President of Starbucks). The interesting part of this was how most of these people viewed this period as their “personal” time for their productivity.
This time was utilized by them to plan their day in an optimistic way, work on exercises, meditate, pray or read for their personal growth. To cap it all, the journalist found out they were early sleepers, which may have certain social problems for them.
But reading all these, there’s a question I’m sure you’ll be asking. I asked myself too. Why at that time? Why do they wake up by 4 a.m?
To begin, according to the article, their reasons for waking up at that particular period weren’t far-fetched and some of them
include:
1. Fewer Distractions
As most of them shoulder responsibilities either from family or work, they’re prone to quite a lot of distractions from people around these factors.
But at that hour, the rate at which distractions might come from these people decreases which provides them with some quiet time and state to think or work on their plans.
Furthermore, they get to find time to themselves to embark on certain things they might have been stalling or haven’t been able to work on as a result of how busy they might have been the day before.
That way, before another string of new activities, ties them up, they get to achieve part of their plans.
When they wake up then, they get less or even no emails at all which gives them no distractions to get on other important things.
2. More Energy
Billionaires need their energy to get through the day and achieve productivity and success in their activities. When they wake up early like 4 a.m, they work on different routines that can give them the energy needed to make the most of their day.
Be it meditation, exercise, or eating healthy meals, they can create time to indulge in activities that will give them the energy to potentially achieve something worthwhile during the day.
3. Feel More Positive And Happier
According to a 2012 National Library of Medicine study, healthy adults who woke up early had a more optimistic state of mind than night owls.
As such, another reason billionaires are early risers is that it allows them to reap the merits of an optimistic mind.
It helps them adopt an energetic, stress-free, and positive approach to life. They also get a sense of order in life, which can make them feel happier.
Is It Good To Wake Up At 4 am?
Yes, 4 am is the new 6 am for billionaires, and for some people, it’s just a result of their responsibilities. But others just find themselves waking up by 4 am and at a loss.
Either way, there’s an ultimate question that comes up at one point or another: is it good to wake up at 4 am?
Firstly, put in mind that if you don’t fulfill the advised sleep duration which is 6 to 8 hours for an average adult and you wake up by 4 am, it’s nothing close to ideal, to begin with.
According to a professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Charles A. Czeisler, early rising is a “performance killer”. He explains this by stating that regularly getting sleep for four hours is the mental impairment equivalent of being up for 24 hours.
In another statement by Robert Stickgold, a Harvard professor and the director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, he said that missing just a night of sleep has a negative impact on memory.
But on a worse note, it “biases your behavior,” he explained, referring to a recent study that monitored 65 healthy people between the ages of 18 and 30, which expressed a discovery that an impaired mindsets their sights “on negative information when molding decisions.”
But if these hours are kept to and you wake up at 4 am or you wake up before your stipulated rising time at 4 am, it might not necessarily have a negative effect on your overall development since you are maintaining the requisite 6-8 hours.
It is also important to note that tampering with your normal circadian rhythm still has consequences no matter how much sleep you get if you’re not used to being an early riser.
So if you have thoughts about waking up at 4 even fulfilling all the requirements or you don’t want to sleep back after you suddenly wake up by 4 am, give yourself another chance.
Some months ago, researchers at the University of South Florida and Pennsylvania State University gave reports that missing out on as little as 16 minutes a night could have serious impacts that are far from positive on your job performance.
A behavioral sleep medicine specialist at the University of Chicago Sleep Disorders Center, Lisa Medalie explains that the reason is that our circadian rhythm send signals to our brain when to produce our sleep hormone, melatonin, so if you try to get up from sleep while melatonin is still produced by your brain, you could have feelings of too much daytime sleepiness, reduced energy, as well as a decrease in mood and cognitive impact.
Also, keep in mind that waking up by 4 am means adjusting the rest of your day to fit into this without hitches or inconveniences. If not, this will make 4 am a bad choice for waking up.
In all, this expresses the fact that waking up at 4 am is a personal choice for different people which makes it less straightforward to say it’s good or bad for them. If you are able to successfully adjust to certain things and maintain your routine, it’ll count as a good habit.
But when you compare and contrast the decisions by several kinds of research, quotes by medical professionals and studies, and include your well-being and self-development, you can get your own answer to this question and decide if it’s a good or bad idea for you.
How Can I Wake Up By 4 am Every Day?
We all have different reasons for our choices. As conflicting as the choice of waking up by 4 am might be, it’s a habit some have to just keep to.
Others find it as something they have to learn to do for reasons best known to them. If you want to rise from bed by 4 am every day, here are a few tips that can help you.
1. Sleep Early
One of the most natural things to do if you plan to wake up by 4 am daily is to sleep early. As I have constantly maintained, an average adult is advised to get at least 6 to 8 hours of sleep.
Calculate these hours from when you sleep and ensure it falls in line with the acceptable time range if you will be waking up by 4 am. When you measure this backward, you see that for you to get up from bed by 4 am, you must retire around 8 to 10 pm.
This way, you give your body the number of hours it needs to get some rest and naturally wake up to get on anything you want to do.
To make this easier for you, you can set an alarm on your phone or your clock or find any other means to make sure you wake up then. But even when you get up from bed then, you know that you’ve fulfilled the amount of sleep you need to get.
If you think you’ll be getting disturbances in the middle of the night, you can sleep in earlier hours so that either way, you can still get a considerable amount of the advisable sleep you need.
2. Understand The Reason Behind Waking Up By 4 am
According to Michelle Segar, Ph.D., a healthy-living expert and motivation scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, implementing any form of change in your life like waking up by 4 am involves vividly defining the importance of this change.
Ask yourself first, why do I want to wake up by 4 am? Do you want to get ahead of some work? Do you want to spend more time with your family? Or just want to prepare well for the next day?
Once you answer these questions, go forward to explain this change to people that might be involved with it too. As little it might sound, accountability can be as important as setting an alarm clock to wake up at 4 am.
3. Understand Your Internal Clock Better
For someone who wishes to get on waking up at 4 am for a long time, understanding your body clock better goes a long way in making you achieve this choice to get up by 4 am.
If you’ve been waking up at this time for a while, you might not have the knowledge of how much sleep your body would want naturally if you weren’t staying up late and keeping to your alarm clock in the morning.
Generally, a sleep doctor, Dr. Lack explains that your body creates changes in anticipation of your retiring to sleep, such as a drop in temperature and heart rate and secreting melatonin into your bloodstream one to two hours before your regular bedtime.
At about 3 or 4 a.m, this get-some-sleep cycle finishes, and then your body begins a gradual morning waking-up process.
Setting a consistent bedtime that starts about eight hours before your alarm is going to go off is one of the few paths to discover what might work best for you. Be loyal to that for several weeks to find out how your body responds.
Lack explains that naturally, some people are night owls and will still find it difficult to sleep early (at least what early means to them, personally), even if they have to wake up early as well.
4. Turn Off Technology Before Bedtime
We are all familiar with the saying, early to bed, early to rise. Once I learned how to apply this in my life, I experienced a whole new level of progress and general improvement. Part of waking up early is sleeping enough the night before.
You must understand that engaging and spending a lot of time in front of screens like TV, mobile phones, or laptops up until bedtime doesn’t make restful sleep a possibility. In fact, these activities can go on to create hitches in waking up at 4 am.
So if you want to wake up at 4 am, try using the alarm clock in the gadget you use mostly to set a reminder for you to turn off all technology at least an hour before you retire for sleep. Discipline is important here so try not to make any excuses.
5. Reorganise Your Day
To make your evening quite spacious enough to sleep early, rearranging your day goes a long way in making you achieve waking up at 4 am. Look at your day and how you spend it.
To make waking up at 4 am a possibility, sleeping early is important which also means you have to compromise on some things you do.
For instance, if you spend some time watching a show after breakfast in the morning before you leave for work, you can let go of watching this show to save you more time at work.
If at night is the only time to get to do some things that can alter your sleeping time, poor sleep is bound to happen. So it’s advisable to find another time during the day to do this.
About 12 percent of adults have a believe that their work schedule creates an impossibility to get enough sleep, according to a National Sleep Foundation survey.
If you’re soaked in work or neck deep into your studies, try to find ways to stretch this work by getting help from a partner or a colleague or finding other ways to make this work easier. With this, you get chances to sleep early which makes waking up at 4 am a possibility.
6. Visit A Doctor About What’s Affecting Your Sleep
Sleep disorders, such as obstructive sleep apnea, or health issues, such as depression or allergies could disrupt your sleep pattern and leave you with poor sleep quality.
Regardless of how hard you try to sleep on time or wake up on time, at 4am, you’ll still feel exhausted in the morning and sleepy during the day.
Visit a doctor and get their advice or a diagnosis if you have a condition that’s making sleep hard for you.
For some, it might be their partner or roommate who makes their sleeping hard by snoring or gasping for air. Talk to them about working on this or try visiting a medical health professional.
7. Work On Hitting Your “Snooze” Button Less Faster
As much as I’ve given you solutions on sleeping early, I’ll also like to discuss answers to getting out of my bed. If you have an alarm right next to your bed and the big “snooze” button isn’t difficult to reach without straining to get out of bed, you’re probably going to try to sleep in longer.
To force you out of bed to turn your alarm clock off which is a potential way for sleep to leave your eyes easily, put your alarm clock at the other end of your bedroom.
Setting a second alarm far away should also be considered if you find it hard to wake up. When you’re trying to reset your sleep and wake times, you might also ask family members or roommates to assist you to get up until you’re in sync.
I, for one, relate to this as a helpful and great way to wake up any time I want to. So if you put all these in place. I’m certain you will too.
8. Keep A Sleep Log And Make A Weekly Evaluation
For a habit you plan to take on for quite a while, it might be important to keep track of all the better sleep efforts you’re creating and jot your feelings down.
Has your productivity increased? Do you spend a better time with your family after these? Are you keeping up with this routine or you still hit snooze on your alarm often.
After trying a new strategy or two for a week, go back to your journals. If the steps you’re taking are working, don’t back down on them. If not, take another look at the hurdles and consider other paths you could tread.
Furthermore, Segar goes on to explain going through this weekly experiment and evaluating your cycle for 6 to 12 weeks. “Don’t expect perfection,” she says. “That’s another way to fail.” Instead, be self-compassionate as you figure out how to make changes to this important lifestyle.”
With this, you get to exhaust different options and hopefully, find a way to successfully wake up at 4 am.
Why Do I Wake Up At 4 am
Waking up in the middle of the night is quite common among us. Most even wake up several times at night without even observing this because they go back to sleep quickly.
If you wake up at 4 a.m and can’t fall right back asleep, it may be for several reasons. These include lighter sleep cycles, stress, or underlying health conditions.
The reasons behind you waking up at 4 am could be for several reasons. Some of which include
- Stress
- Insomnia
- Aging
- Medications
- Lifestyle choices
- Other health conditions including depression, arthritis to mention a few.
Once you find solutions to these problems, you can find ways to tackle them and approach this to wake up at 4 am naturally without any implications.
Conclusion
Waking up at 4 am might be something common to successful people. But understanding the pros and cons around making this a successful decision for you is equally important as also practicing it.
If you decide to take 4 a.m as your wake-up time for reasons best known to you, understand that it’s absolutely beneficial to know and study yourself and see how this will impact your health.
Also, do your best to make the most of the merits of this as it’s the major reason for you getting into it. 4 am might be the new 6 am for champions but it might also not be the ideal time for you.
Save this for later!
