A Stanford sleep medicine doctor teaches anyone how to wake up earlier — and feel better about it.

As an undergraduate student in biology at the University of Puerto Rico, Rafael Pelayo He worked three jobs to pay for school. To accommodate his employers, he attended 7 o’clock classes and got up at 5:30 a.m. to use the commute time to study.

When he was a medical student at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, NY, four years later, classes began on the day. Like most of his peers, Pelayo often pulls all-nighters, taking short breaks around midnight to hang out with his friends.

Today, Pelayo is a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford and a leading expert in the field of sleep medicine (his 2020 book is called How to sleep). but . . . Is he a morning person or a night owl?

The answer turns out to be nothing.

“We all have a genetic tendency to be a morning person or a night person,” says Pelayo, who came to Stanford to work with the deceased in 1993. William DementHe was known as the “Father of Sleep Medicine” and went on to teach a popular undergraduate course in what is now known as dementia. Depression sleep and dreams. But your inclinations are not your destiny.

Biology plays a role in our sleep patterns, Pelayo points out. This is especially true for teenagers who tend to go to bed later and get more sleep as they transition into adulthood, and for older people who generally want to sleep easier.

“Sleep is a dangerous thing by nature, so in the human race, it makes sense that some people are more awake at times than others,” he said.

To deal with the biological facts of teenagers, Pelayo A California law In the year The 2019 pass requires middle and high schools to start earlier than 8 a.m. and 8:30 a.m., respectively.

But adolescence aside, sleep habits are more suitable than we think. Although there’s nothing unhealthy about going to bed late and staying up late, Pelayo says, a form of chronic jet lag can develop as night owls struggle to meet society’s normal schedule and expectations.

So for those of you who want to wake up early (or get to work on time) to get a jump start on the day and don’t have a sleep problem that needs treatment, Pelayo offers some practical advice:

To set your sleep schedule, you must first identify the ideal wake-up time.

First, choose your ideal alarm time.

I ask my patients, if you could wave a magic wand and easily fall asleep and wake up feeling rested, what schedule would you want to be on? He explains.

Pelayo first addresses the patient’s wake time because “it’s easier to lock in a wake clock than to force a sleep clock,” which is different from a sleep clock. “Bedtime is when you go to bed,” he explains. “Sleep time is the total time you spend in bed until you get out.”

Many people think that the time they wake up depends on the time they sleep, this seems reasonable. But in reality, “the mind is trying to predict dawn and dusk at any moment.”

That method – is administered by the so-called. Clock genesIt controls our circadian rhythms in the animal kingdom, even in flies.

“We don’t have much in common with flies,” Pelayo said. “But flies must know what time it is.”

It’s easy to choose a bedtime based on your sleep time and the number of hours you want to sleep.

Then set a bedtime.

Once you’ve set a preferred alarm time, decide how much sleep you want and then work backwards to get to bed. General guidelines for adults are 7 to 9 hours of sleep, and you want to personalize that so you’re tired, not tired, Pelayo says.

After you’ve done the math, don’t tuck yourself under the covers until it’s your proper bedtime, even if you want to go to bed early.

“If you hold your breath, you take a deep breath when you start breathing again,” Pelo explains. “The less you sleep, the more your body wants to sleep.”

You’ve probably heard this advice before: don’t use the snooze button.

Don’t snooze.

A snooze sounds wonderful at this point, but the time it takes to enjoy a good night’s sleep after our alarm goes off isn’t worth it.

“You’re trading dream time for lighter sleep,” Pelayo says. “This is a bad deal.”

Instead of giving yourself those nine “extra” minutes to snooze (or 18—we see you), get up when your alarm goes off at the time you choose, Pelayo says, even if it means keeping the clock in the room. Do it.

If you plan to do something you enjoy when you wake up, it will help you go to bed on time and wake up on schedule.

Find something fun to do.

Most of us need a reason to get out of bed before we even get up; Otherwise, we sleep until the last minute.

“When I was an undergraduate, I was a morning person because I was motivated,” Pelayo says. “You have to get that boost.”

Pelayo recommends rewarding yourself by doing something that makes you happy—especially something that exposes your body to light, such as going for a walk. But even playing video games works.

“Do what you want to do to increase your motivation,” he says. And to make matters worse, don’t allow yourself to do that one thing at any time of the day.

You can wake up in the middle of the night. If you don’t worry about it, this shouldn’t be a problem.

Don’t be overwhelmed.

It’s good to wake up in the middle of the night. In fact, everyone does, Pelayo says. One of Dement’s first discoveries was that humans wake up every hour and a half or so, an evolutionary practice left over from when we needed to do so to protect ourselves.

Often, we don’t even realize we’re awake, but anyone who’s laid in bed at night with a to-do list filled with emotions knows that’s not always the case.

Still, “awakening is not a problem,” Pelayo says. “He’s getting upset about it.”

Adjusting your sleep schedule takes time, so keep at it.

keep going.

Making changes to sleep takes practice, Pello says—waking up at a time of our choosing consistently for at least six weeks. In the clinic, he and his colleagues combine circadian, homeostatic, and behavioral techniques, and it is the last of these—adhering to a new habit—that takes the longest to change.

“People do things for three to four days and say, ‘Oh, it didn’t work,'” he says. But our brains aren’t designed to make such big shifts so quickly. You are developing a system to predict the rotation of the Earth.