How to wake up in a healthy way.
There are two things I would like to point out first when discussing the topic of waking up in a healthy way.
1) I often hear from people. "You know, I sleep four, five hours. I wake up just fine." And then when I inquire further they say, "I use two alarms [or three or four]” or “I have somebody wake me up, but hey, I wake up and I go to work and I'm fine."
If you're having to be woken up or you're having to arrange something, some device, or someone has to stimulate you with noise or shaking you up or however to wake you up in the morning, that only tells you one thing: you're not sleeping long enough.
If you're sleeping long enough, you should be able to wake up on your own without any intervention. So that's one important thing to understand.
2) The second important thing has to do with people getting used to less sleep and waking up on their own. This can often happen when a habit is created.
A common situation in which this occurs is for people who work in the military. No matter how much sleep they get or don’t get, they're forced to wake up very early in the morning. And if they don't, there are consequences for that. Once they do this for several years their body just gets used to waking up as if they've had enough sleep, but they have not and that tends to affect them later in life.
These two points are really important because they're quite common.
As you wake up in the morning, after having had enough sleep wake up on your own. Then gradually getting up and going on with your routine is just fine. If you exercise in the morning, then that will helps you feel more energized. If you eat a full breakfast in the morning, then that also helps you go about your day much better.
Another important point that people don't often recognize comes up when you awake in the morning and feel sensitive to bright light or not hungry for breakfast. I will often hear from patients, "I'm just not hungry in the mornings."
If you're not hungry in the mornings that tells me that you woke up physiologically, but your body was not yet ready to get up. The body's mechanism of getting enough sleep and waking up in the morning has to do with priming you to get up in the morning, get going, and be as productive as you can. This is a well-defined, very basic science of how the human body evolved over thousands of years — maybe longer. The human body was programmed this way so that after a person woke up, they could go out hunting or do what was necessary to survive.
The hormone levels in the body change before you are ready to wake up to prime every system in the body so that it's ready to go and function at its best. If that's not happening, you have to look at what's affecting your sleep. Either you're not sleeping well enough or you’re not sleeping long enough.
— Amer Khan, MD
