Waking up a few times during the night is common and completely normal. If you struggle to fall back asleep or wake up frequently, other factors might be keeping you from a good night's rest. Environment, diet, medication, mental health or physical health could impact your sleep quality.
A room that is too cold, too hot, or too humid may cause frequent awakenings. Most doctors recommend keeping the thermostat set between 60-67 °F to get good sleep. The bedroom should be completely dark. Using room-darkening shades or curtains may help.
Cycling out of sleep roughly every 90 minutes to two hours is normal. But frequent wakings can affect physical, emotional and mental functioning.
Normally, at night time, melatonin levels will naturally increase, and cortisol (our stress hormone), will naturally be lower (than in the mornings). If you are under acute stress, or you have been under chronic stress, you may notice that you tend to wake up between 2-4 am and have difficulty falling back asleep.
“It's very common for people to wake up around 2 or 3 a.m. because this is when our sleep architecture (the pattern of our sleep stage cycles throughout the night) naturally has a shift from more deep sleep to more REM sleep.
Because there are so many different things that can wake you up, there's no specific number of awakenings that is a cause for concern, Brandon Peters, M.D., a board-certified neurologist and sleep medicine specialist, tells SELF. “[The number can] vary night by night due to different reasons,” he says.
Common causes of chronic insomnia include: Stress. Concerns about work, school, health, finances or family can keep your mind active at night, making it difficult to sleep. Stressful life events or trauma — such as the death or illness of a loved one, divorce, or a job loss — also may lead to insomnia.
Overall, the studies showed that melatonin was better than placebo for improving both the time to fall asleep and total sleep.
In fact, the average number of awakenings hovers around six times per night. As the body cycles through various stages of sleep, including deep sleep and REM sleep, it dips from shallower to deeper states.
Nighttime (nocturnal) panic attacks can occur with no obvious trigger and awaken you from sleep. As with a daytime panic attack, you may experience sweating, rapid heart rate, trembling, shortness of breath, heavy breathing (hyperventilation), flushing or chills, and a sense of impending doom.
Middle insomnia describes a difficulty maintaining sleep after initial sleep onset. For these individuals, sleep is fragmented with frequent awakenings at night. Middle insomnia is commonly associated with neurological syndromes (e.g., RLS), pain syndromes, or depression.
If you can't sleep even though you're tired, it may be poor sleep hygiene, being out of sync with your body clock, stress, anxiety, naps, screens, hormones, a sleep disorder, or a medical condition.
Typically, you should be able to sleep six to eight hours during the night without having to get up to go to the bathroom. But, people who have nocturia wake up more than once a night to pee.
Waking up throughout the night is actually a normal part of sleep. In fact, a newer study1 shows that our brain wakes up more than 100 times throughout the night due to the stress hormone, noradrenaline. These moments of wakefulness are so minuscule, though, that the sleeper won't notice.
Fragmented sleep and nocturnal waking may accompany mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression, or bipolar disorder. People with post-traumatic stress disorder often experience nightmares and nighttime awakenings that cause severe disruption to sleep.
It is common to wake up during sleep. In fact most people wake two or three times during the night. We can all remember a time, when as teenagers or young children, sleep was a continuous period of unawareness or oblivion that lasted between eight or nine hours, or even longer.
Sleep deprivation can make this logic seem sound, but experts say taking melatonin in the middle of the night can actually make your sleep schedule even worse.