How can you finally stop oversleeping in the morning? When you want to wake up in time every single day, there are some rules you have to follow. In this article, you’ll learn about the 7 things you can do to stop your oversleeping instantly. Personally, I use all of these tips myself. They are bulletproof, well-tested and verified strategies to stop oversleeping in the morning.
Here’s what you’re going to learn about to stop oversleeping:
- Stop Oversleeping with the Right Bedtime Preparation
- Stop Oversleeping by Using Sleep Time Calculators
- Establish a Sleep Schedule and Stop Oversleeping Naturally
- Never Oversleep Again using the 100$-Oversleeping-Challenge
- Use Sleep Masks and Earplugs to Stop Oversleeping in the Morning
- Get Someone Else to Wake You Up
- Wake Up Gradually using Sunlight
Stop Oversleeping in the Morning with the Right Bedtime Preparation
If you continuously oversleep, there’s a high chance, that something is going wrong with your sleep. To finally stop oversleeping, you need to remove all the sleep-disturbing devices from your bedtime routine and build some solid strategies to make sure you wake up in time every single day.
Get rid of your Smartphone before you go to Bed
The first thing that you need to understand is that your smartphone is your biggest enemy when it comes to falling asleep. The bright light from the display shifts your sleep rhythm and prevents you from falling asleep by blocking your melatonin production (that’s the hormone that makes you tired). Make sure that as soon as you go to bed, you don’t have access to your phone anymore. Having your phone next to you at night tempts you to check messages and disrupts your sleep.
From now on, you’re going to place your phone in another corner of the room before you go to bed. Personally, I always place it on a desk where it’s hardly accessible from my bed. Now that you place your phone somewhere else, you can fall asleep much better, and even more important, you can slowly build a sleep rhythm that will automatically wake you up at the same time every day. It’s the first important step to stop oversleeping.
Force yourself to stand up in the morning using your alarm
You can leverage the anti-oversleeping capabilities of your alarm by simply placing it in a hard-to-reach spot in your room. Whether you use your smartphone as your alarm or an alarm clock doesn’t matter. Just make sure that you have to stand up in the morning to stop your alarm ringtone.
The harder you make your alarm to reach before you go to bed, the bigger the chance you stop oversleeping. Also, make sure to set your alarm ringtone as loud as possible. There should be no chance that you don’t hear it.
If you feel like you oversleep because you can’t hear your alarm clock, take a look at this in-depth guide: What to do if you can’t hear your alarm clock?
Personally, I like to place my phone, which I also use as an alarm, on top of a shelf. Doing that guarantees that I don’t have any access to my phone while I’m falling asleep and also it makes sure that I stop oversleeping in the morning: “Kill two birds with one stone”.
Stop Oversleeping in the Morning by making it difficult to go back to bed
Once you shut down your alarm and you are awake in the morning, you might be tempted to go back to bed. But how can you stop this temptation? Here’s my approach:
Build hurdles that make it difficult to go back to bed to stop oversleeping.
As long as it’s easy to go back to bed, you are likely to do so. Here’s my strategy that you can use to stop oversleeping:
- Turn off the alarm (Don’t use the snooze button).
- Immediately make your bed.
- Get out of your comfortable clothes fast.
- Drink a glass of water.
All these things take only 3 minutes, but you’ve built 4 hurdles that stop you from going to bed again. In order to comfortably go to bed again you would need to set your alarm again (because you didn’t use your snooze button). You would mess up your tidy bed. And you would need to put on your sleep clothes again.
These hurdles stop oversleeping in the morning by forcing you to stay awake. Drinking a glass of water additionally wakes you up gradually. You immediately stop feeling groggy and you are ready to start the day.
Stop Oversleeping in the Morning by Calculating your Optimal Sleep Times
Sleep consists of two alternating phases you need to know about: Deep and shallow sleep phases. Sleep scientists know even more, but to stop oversleeping in the morning, you don’t need to be a sleep expert. These two sleep phases alternate approximately every 1.5 hours. That means you sleep deeply for 1.5 hours and the next 1.5 hours, you have shallow sleep.
When you wake up in the morning there are two possible outcomes regarding how you feel: Either you feel fit and refreshed or you feel tired and groggy. And these two moods can be connected to the sleep phase during which you wake up.
Oversleeping happens when your alarm goes off during deep sleep
When your alarm goes off in the morning, it interrupts your sleep. What do you think is worse? Having your sleep interrupted during shallow or during deep sleep? Right: You need to avoid waking up in a deep sleep cycle.
When you wake up in a deep sleep state, your brain is not ready to wake up because it is busy cleaning itself. It regulates your memory and actually performs real chemical cleaning of harmful substances. When you wake up in this cleaning-state, you will feel terrible and oftentimes, you will oversleep. Somehow, you need a way to make sure that you always wake up in a shallow sleep phase. Here’s the solution:
How to use Sleep Time Calculators to Stop Oversleeping in the Morning
To stop oversleeping in the morning, you can simply use a sleep time calculator. That’s a small tool you can find online and it’s pretty simple to use.
All you have to do is to enter either the time at which you plan to wake up or the time at which you want to go to bed. The sleep calculator then suggests the best times to go to bed and to wake up in order to make sure you don’t wake up in a deep sleep phase.
You will mostly get 3 different sleep time results. The one with the longest sleep duration is the best choice. The other results are okay, but they usually are only 5-6 hours of sleep which is not healthy at all.
Personally, I love to use sleep time calculators when I have to wake up at an unusual time and I want to make sure that I wake up feeling refreshed.
By using a sleep time calculator you make sure that you sleep enough and wake up at just the right time. It’s a great way to stop oversleeping in the morning.
Stop Oversleeping in the Morning by Establishing a Sleep Schedule and Sticking to it
About everything you do is steered by habits. When you go to bed, do you consciously think about how to lie down? No, you just do it the same way you do it every day without thinking. Lots of similar habits happen just like this. A big part of your brain does the unconscious work. It processes movements and sensory impacts you don’t need to think about. Your body just loves habits because they make things uncomplicated.
Similarly, establishing sleep habits makes sleep more refreshing and will stop your oversleeping. A sleep schedule is one of those sleep habits. It makes sure that you automatically wake up at the same time every day. Sounds like a good way to stop oversleeping in the morning, right?
How to establish a sleep schedule to stop oversleeping
I’ve written lots of articles on this. Here’s a small summary:
To establish a sleep schedule and make it a habit, you simply go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. Even on the weekends. Make sure that you get more than 8 hours of sleep. That’s it.
After only one week, you’ll start noticing that you automatically wake up right before your alarm goes off in the morning. Notice something? You automatically wake up. A sleep schedule is an effective way to stop oversleeping in the morning. You just have to stick to it.
Build evening rituals to support your sleep schedule
If you think you’ll have difficulties setting up a sleep schedule, I’d say you need to build an evening ritual. An evening ritual is something you do every night before you go to bed. It prepares you for sleep and makes sure you become tired.
Here are 3 things you can do as an evening ritual:
- Read a book
- Tidy your room
- Draw
But there are endless other possibilities. It just shouldn’t involve any electronics which distract you from sleep and keep you awake. When your evening ritual becomes a habit, performing it tells your brain: “Oh, I’m doing [Insert evening ritual], so I will go to bed in a few minutes, let’s already get tired”.
Similarly, you can use morning rituals to wake up and prepare for your day. Anyways, you will definitely stop oversleeping in the morning with evening rituals that strengthen your sleep schedule.
If you want to learn more about evening rituals to make you fall asleep faster and how to combine different evening rituals to form an evening routine that unlocks your sleep quality every single day (I’ve cured my insomnia with this strategy), check out our Natural Sleep Program.
It’s a step-by-step sleep guide that contains exactly what you need to sleep better than ever before!
Never Oversleep Again using the 100$-Oversleeping-Challenge
Let me tell you something: I use this exact strategy every time I want to accomplish something I don’t think I can. It never missed.
Here’s how it works: If you want to stop oversleeping in the morning, tell a close friend, a partner, your brother or your sister you will give him / her 100$ every time you oversleep. Preferably, you should pick someone you meet on a regular basis. Make a small handwritten contract and get serious about it. You will give that chosen person 100$ when you don’t manage to stop oversleeping in the morning.
Your friend will be excited to earn 100$ so he/she will ask you every day whether you overslept.
You can even agree on a daily proof e.g. send him a selfie of you next to your alarm clock every single morning so he/she can verify that you passed the challenge.
I guarantee you, you will not lose that 100$. You will use all the resources you have (alarm, morning coffee, right sleep time) in order to wake up in time every day. On top of that, your brain will connect oversleeping to loss of money. Once you manage to wake up in time for 2 weeks, you can stop worrying. After 2 weeks, a habit starts to form and you successfully stopped oversleeping.
This method is similar to building a sleep schedule, but you are more motivated to stick to it. It’s a great choice if you feel like there’s no way to stop oversleeping for you.
Personally, I have such a 100$ challenge running with my girlfriend for a writing habit I want to establish. I’m successfully passing the fifth month now and it’s becoming easier every day.
Use Sleep Masks and Earplugs to Stop Oversleeping in the Morning
Sleep masks and earplugs are sleep aids you shouldn’t miss in your daily routine. Whenever you sleep in a noisy or bright environment, they are your friends. Noise and brightness both drastically affect your sleep rhythm and sleep quality which in turn will increase the chance you will oversleep.
You can only successfully stop oversleeping when you have sufficient sleep duration and sleep quality.
I’ve seen it lots of times. People complain about not being able to fall asleep, but they totally forget about eliminating noise and light at night. If you have any noise or light source in your bedroom, you need to make use of earplugs and sleep masks. They make you feel refreshed in the morning and guarantee you will stop oversleeping in the morning.
In case you don’t know how to use sleep masks and earplugs effectively, I’ve written complete and easy beginner articles about them.
Get someone else to wake you up
Please note: This is the absolute last resort to stop oversleeping in the morning.
If you believe you can’t stop oversleeping on your own, get someone else to wake you up. This can be a partner, your parents or whoever lives with you. Maybe they can even let your dog attack you so you don’t oversleep.
Although getting someone else to wake you up works 100% of the time, there’s one major downside to it in my opinion: You give away your personal responsibility to wake up in the morning. In the long term, it lowers your self-esteem and it reduces your self-discipline. You shouldn’t outsource your sleep capabilities and become dependent on someone else.
If, however, you have a sleep disorder, getting help from someone else might be the only solution for you.
Please do it only after you’ve tested all of the other strategies I mentioned in this article.
Wake Up Gradually using Sunlight to Stop Oversleeping in the Morning
Here’s another one that just came to my mind. Of course, this doesn’t work together with sleep masks, but when you just can’t stop oversleeping in the morning, I would pick this tactic. I made use of this strategy back in my school days when I had insomnia. This strategy even works if you don’t have a sleep schedule and also when you don’t have the best sleep quality.
As you might know, light has an impact on your sleep. Whenever the visual sensory nerves in your eyes sense light, your brain automatically comes to the clue that it’s daytime and you should wake up. Your brain then blocks your melatonin production. Melatonin is one of the main hormones responsible for your sleep.
How can you wake up with light? There are two ways you can accomplish this.
Sleep without Window Shades so light comes in
When you have window shades in your room, try sleeping without them for a few nights. You’ll notice that you wake up automatically when the sun rises. Personally I love to do it on the weekends because I tend to oversleep on Saturdays and Sundays. But when the sun rises early, I find myself waking up at 7 or 8 am without any alarm clock. To stop oversleeping in the morning, simply sleep without window shades. Let sunrise light pass through your window.
Of course, this only works if the sun rises early as well. If you have a job that requires you to wake up before sunrise, there’s another strategy.
Use a sunrise wake-up alarm clock
Sunrise wake up alarm clocks are like regular alarm clocks, but with a built-in light that starts getting brighter when you need to wake up. If you set your alarm at 6 am, the sunrise wake-up alarm clock will slowly increase its brightness at 5:30 am, so you slowly wake up to the light. It essentially simulates a sunrise.
I’ve had one before (until I accidentally broke it – my fault) and they are great. Here’s one that’s very affordable and full of great features I recommend:
How to Stop Oversleeping In The Morning – The Outline
Oversleeping is often a cause of bad sleeping habits and difficult to tackle when you don’t have the right tactics. With these strategies you have realistic chances to stop oversleeping in the morning:
- Build an evening ritual
- Build a solid sleep schedule
- Calculate your sleep times
- Use sleep masks and earplugs
- Use the sunrise to wake up with light
- Make it a challenge to wake up in time
- Last resort: Get someone else to wake you up
When you try these strategies, you are on the best way to stop your oversleeping issues. Not only that, but you will also sleep better in general and feel healthier and refreshed when you wake up.
Also, I recommend you as an oversleeper to check out our other articles on how to sleep better and what to do to build a solid sleep rhythm.