Why do I wake up at 3 a.m. every night?
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Now wide awake from a once peaceful slumber, you roll over to check the clock and find it’s 3 a.m. That’s the same time you woke up last night. And the night before. What's going on?
Now wide awake from a once peaceful slumber, you roll over to check the clock and find it’s 3 a.m. That’s the same time you woke up last night. And the night before.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because nocturnal awakenings happen to a lot of people. Waking up several times throughout the night is a natural occurrence often due to sleep architecture, which are the stages of sleep that one cycles through every night.
These awakenings usually only last for anywhere from a few seconds up to a few minutes — if they happen too frequently in one night or there are disruptions to falling back asleep, that could be a problem. Here’s what experts say could help.
Sleep architecture refers to the four stages of sleep people cycle through during the night in about 90 to 120-minute intervals, said Dr. Brandon Peters-Mathews, a neurologist with Virginia Mason Franciscan Health in Seattle.
The cycle begins with a light sleep that transitions into a deeper sleep, and then into the deepest sleep that occurs in the third stage, often referred to as “slow-wave sleep,” Peters-Mathews said. During the fourth stage, known as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, brain activity picks up to levels that almost reach normal activity while awake — it’s after this stage when people often wake up naturally, he said, and once they fall back asleep the cycle begins again.
“Because we tend to go to bed at roughly the same time on a nightly basis, and these cycles are roughly the same length, we may wake at the same time in the night,” Peters-Mathews said. Most of these awakenings will be brief and forgettable, but “there might be one or two cycles into the night that we wake up and look at the clock and are aware of the time.”
Waking up several times throughout the night is typically not disruptive to one’s health, as long as falling back asleep occurs within about five to 10 minutes, said Dr. Michelle Drerup, director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at the Cleveland Clinic.
