Early waking (me!) How do I stop?

[tallulah]

Just lately I'm having real problems sleeping. I tend to wake up about an hour before I need to get up. It then takes me ages to get back to sleep, so that the alarm wakes me with a jump.

I have to get up at 6.45 but I've been waking any time from about 5am to just before 6am. It is SO frustrating. I then spend the whole day feeling like a used dish-rag & I'm exhausted by 10pm.

I tried going to bed at 9.30pm the other night & despite being exhausted couldn't get off until after 11.15pm.

At the weekends, when I could catch up, I wake up at 6.45 all perky!!! WHY???!!!

Any ideas how I can sort this out? (No babies or little children in the equation- no-one in the house stirs before I wake them).

tallulah, my dd's waking early at the moment (got a thread on it) but I also wake very early and have problems getting back to sleep. Often I'm awake at 5am with a kind of horrible 'empty head' feeling which isn't quite awake but is also very hard to get to sleep again. I usually manage to doze off only to be then fully awoken by dd. It is frustrating, I agree. Before dd's recently starting to wake early she was up at about 7.15am but I'd have always been awake for a while before then.

Sorry, I have no solution, just lots of sympathy!

Maybe you are worrying about it so much that you are kind of programming your brain to wake early? Do you have lots on your mind about work? Can you try making a list before you go to sleep of anything that might be preying on your mind? And - truly absurd suggesion coming up - tap your pillow before you go to skeep with the number of taps that equals the hour you want to wake at (not sure what you do about fractions!). I have no idea where I heard that idea, but who knows??!

I am not generally insane BTW.