Sleep
How to fix your sleep schedule
Fix your sleep schedule from the wake-up end. Move your alarm 15 to 30 minutes a day toward the time you want, get bright light soon after waking, and keep that time on weekends. Morning light moved the body clock 2.1 hours in 3 days (Burgess and colleagues, 2003).
Last updated
Reviewed by Mohammed Raqeeb
Step by step
How to fix your sleep schedule in six steps.
Fixing a sleep schedule means moving your body clock, the inner timing that makes you sleepy at night and alert in the day, and that clock moves slowly. The 6 steps below move it from the one end you control, the morning, because you can set an alarm but you cannot make yourself fall asleep.
Step 1
Pick the wake time you need.
Choose the time you must be up on your busiest day, and make it every day's wake time. Bedtime is worked out from it later, not the other way around.
Step 2
Move your wake time 15 to 30 minutes a day.
Set the alarm a little closer to the target each morning until you reach it. Small steps keep each new night close to the timing your body already runs on, so you are not fighting it all at once.
Step 3
Get bright light soon after you wake.
Open the curtains or step outside in the first hour, because daylight is the main signal your body clock follows. In a lab study, the body clock moved 2.1 hours in 3 days with bright morning light, and 0.6 hours without it.
Step 4
Go to bed when sleepy, not before.
Bedtime follows the wake time. The hours just before your usual bedtime are the hardest time of day to fall asleep, so forcing an early night mostly means lying awake.
Step 5
Keep weekends within about an hour.
A long weekend lie-in pulls the clock later again and undoes part of the week's work. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), a US government health institute, suggests keeping your weekend schedule within about an hour of your weekdays.
Step 6
Hold the new time for 7 days.
Wake within 30 minutes of the target every day for 7 days in a row. Passing that test is how you know the schedule is fixed.
Your plan
Your plan, day by day.
Enter the time you wake now and the time you want. The plan moves your wake time a little each morning, then holds it for 7 days, with a date on every row. Nothing you enter leaves this page.
Your plan
10days to move
2h 30m earlier, from 9:30 AM to 7:00 AM. Then 7 days of holding the new time, weekends included.
- At the new time
- Day 10
- The test passes
- Day 17
The plan has worked when you wake within 30 minutes of 7:00 AM on all 7 days you hold it. The bedtimes are only a guide: go to bed when you feel sleepy, not before.
Move
15 minutes earlier each morning
- Day 1Up 9:15 AMBed 1:15 AM
- Day 2Up 9:00 AMBed 1:00 AM
- Day 3Up 8:45 AMBed 12:45 AM
- Day 9Up 7:15 AMBed 11:15 PM
- Day 10Up 7:00 AMBed 11:00 PM
Hold
Up within the window, every day
- Day 11Up by 7:30 AMBed 11:00 PM
- Day 12Up by 7:30 AMBed 11:00 PM
- Day 13Up by 7:30 AMBed 11:00 PM
- Day 14Up by 7:30 AMBed 11:00 PM
- Day 15Up by 7:30 AMBed 11:00 PM
- Day 16Up by 7:30 AMBed 11:00 PM
- Day 17Up by 7:30 AMBed 11:00 PM
A worked example
One plan, with dates.
Say you wake at and a new job starts on , with an alarm at . That is 2h 30m to move.
At 30 minutes a day from , you reach in 5 days. Each bedtime is set to leave 8 hours of sleep before the next alarm. The days of holding the new time then run through the first days of the job.
Move
30 minutes earlier each morning
- Up 9:00 AMBed 1:00 AM
- Up 8:30 AMBed 12:30 AM
- Up 8:00 AMBed 12:00 AM
- Up 7:30 AMBed 11:30 PM
- Up 7:00 AMBed 11:00 PM
Hold
Up by every day
- Up by 7:30 AMBed 11:00 PM
- Up by 7:30 AMBed 11:00 PM
- Up by 7:30 AMBed 11:00 PM
- Up by 7:30 AMBed 11:00 PM
- Up by 7:30 AMBed 11:00 PM
- Up by 7:30 AMBed 11:00 PM
- Up by 7:30 AMBed 11:00 PM
Each bar is one night. The bars step left toward the target line while the alarm moves, then stay on it while you hold. If every alarm in the hold lands by , the schedule is fixed by .
The myth
The myth: start by going to bed earlier.
Much of the advice on this question starts with bedtime: go to bed earlier and the rest will follow. The research on when people are able to fall asleep points the other way, toward starting with the morning.
The sleep researcher Peretz Lavie gave people a short chance to fall asleep over and over, around the clock, to map the hours when sleep comes easily (Lavie, 1986). Sleep came easily at night and in the mid-afternoon. It was hardest to reach in the evening hours just before the usual bedtime, a stretch he called the forbidden zone for sleep.
An early bedtime lands you in that zone, lying awake. A fixed wake time and morning light move the zone itself, and bedtime moves with it a few nights later. An earlier bedtime is the result of the plan, not the method.
The weekend lie-in works against you too. Night owls, whom researchers call late chronotypes, sleep in the most on free days, and the gap between their workday and free-day sleep is what researchers call social jetlag, as if they flew a few time zones every weekend (Wittmann and colleagues, 2006). In a lab study by Depner and colleagues, people slept 5 hours a night for a work week and then had a free weekend, and afterward their body clocks ran later (Depner and colleagues, 2019).
Why it works
Why the wake time moves the clock.
Light sets the body clock. Light reaching your eyes tells the brain it is daytime, and the clock lines itself up with that signal (the NHLBI). Waking at a fixed time fixes when that first light arrives each day, which gives the clock a steady signal to follow.
A lab study shows how much the light matters. Preparing people for a flight east, Burgess and colleagues moved the sleep of 28 young adults 1 hour earlier a day for 3 days. With bright light for the first 3.5 hours after waking, the clock moved 2.1 hours. In ordinary dim indoor light it moved 0.6, under a third as far.
Irregular days do the reverse. Phillips and colleagues followed 61 college students who kept sleep diaries for 30 days (Phillips and colleagues, 2017). The students whose bed and wake times jumped around had body clocks running 2h 36m later than the students who kept regular hours, most likely because of when they saw light.
Two smaller habits help the plan hold, both about not pushing bedtime later. The NHLBI notes that caffeine can last up to 8 hours, and suggests adult naps of 20 minutes or less (the NHLBI).
The test
How you know it is working.
A fixed sleep schedule has a plain test: you wake within 30 minutes of your target on 7 days in a row, weekends included. Until then, you are still moving it.
Write down when you woke, every morning, in your own words. Guessing at the end of the week does not work: in one study, people overestimated their own sleep by close to an hour on average (Lauderdale and colleagues, 2008).
The test
Up within 30 minutes of your target, 7 days running.
An example halfway through: four mornings on time, three to go. A miss starts the count again.
The test
You wake within 30 minutes of the time you chose
on 7 days in a row, weekends included.
A good way to keep this record counts the hours from what you already write or say each morning, with no timer and no device on your wrist. Most journaling apps stop at how the night felt, which says nothing about whether you were up by .
One app built for this is Think in Numbers, a smart journaling app with time tracking built in.
You write or say your day in your own words, as it happens or all at once. The app reads what you wrote and counts the hours that went to each part of it: sleep, your phone in bed, and the time you never mentioned (shown as unaccounted). Then it shows those hours over days and weeks. Sleep is placed at the hours it happened, and insights over weeks show whether the new wake time held.
For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.
Here is what passing the test looks like: an example person’s second week, the one where the alarm stopped moving.
Week two · Sleep by night
to- A night, on average
- 6h 30m
- The week
- 45h 30m
- Asleep between
- and
- Up at
- every day
An example person's four weeks, each day read and counted by the app. A made-up person, not a real user. Real output from the part of Think in Numbers that reads your words and adds up the hours (version v21), last run on with the app’s starter categories. Stored as written, not edited.
Four weeks of one person's nights
Sleep a week
45h 15m51h 30m
6h 15m more in week four than in week one
Week one
45h 15m
Up at 7:15 AM on workdays, 10:00 AM at the weekend.
Week two
45h 30m
One wake time, every day. The test passes.
Week three
51h 15m
Asleep before midnight, then one late party.
Week four
51h 30m
One more late night, then back on time.
An example person's four weeks, each day read and counted by the app. A made-up person, not a real user. Real output from the part of Think in Numbers that reads your words and adds up the hours (version v21), last run on with the app’s starter categories. Stored as written, not edited.
Beyond the schedule
When to talk to a doctor.
A schedule that will not move is worth a doctor’s time. The NHLBI says that if you still cannot fall asleep, or cannot adapt to a shift-work schedule, you should talk with your doctor about other options (the NHLBI).
The NHLBI also lists frequent loud snoring, breathing that stops and starts in sleep, and daytime sleepiness as reasons to see a healthcare provider (the NHLBI). This page reports what research found. It is not medical advice.
To total how short your nights are while you shift, use the sleep debt calculator. To check whether your target is enough sleep at all, read is 6 hours of sleep enough.
Sources
Where the numbers come from.
Every figure on this page links to one of these.
- Burgess and colleagues (2003). Preflight adjustment to eastward travel: 3 days of advancing sleep with and without morning bright light. J Biol Rhythms.
- Lavie (1986). Ultrashort sleep-waking schedule. III. 'Gates' and 'forbidden zones' for sleep. Electroencephalogr Clin Neurophysiol.
- Wittmann and colleagues (2006). Social jetlag: misalignment of biological and social time. Chronobiol Int.
- Depner and colleagues (2019). Ad libitum weekend recovery sleep fails to prevent metabolic dysregulation during a repeating pattern of insufficient sleep and weekend recovery sleep. Curr Biol.
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (read ). What Makes You Sleep?
- Phillips and colleagues (2017). Irregular sleep/wake patterns are associated with poorer academic performance and delayed circadian and sleep/wake timing. Sci Rep.
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (read ). Healthy Sleep Habits.
- Lauderdale and colleagues (2008). Self-reported and measured sleep duration: how similar are they? Epidemiology.
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (read ). Sleep Apnea: Symptoms.
Pick the wake time tonight. Set the first alarm 15 minutes earlier, and open the curtains when it goes off.
Keep reading.
- LearnAnswers about sleep, habits, study, people and work, in hours.
- Is 6 hours of sleep enough?What the research says, and how to see your real sleep hours.
- Sleep debt calculatorA week of bed and wake times in, hours short out.
- How long to form a habit66 days on average, and how to tell when yours has formed.
- Where did my week go? calculatorEnter a typical day and see your week accounted and unaccounted.
- Time journalingThe method: write or say your day in your own words, then see it as hours.
Questions
Questions people ask.
How long does it take to fix a sleep schedule?
Take the time you need to move and divide it by 15 to 30 minutes a day, then add 7 days of holding. Moving 2h 30m at 30 minutes a day takes 5 days, plus the 7.
Can I fix my sleep schedule in one day?
Not the body clock. In a lab study, moving sleep an hour a day for 3 days shifted the clock only 0.6 hours in dim light. Staying up all night adds a night of lost sleep, and no study we read shows it resets the clock faster.
Should I change my bedtime or my wake time first?
Your wake time. You can set an alarm, but you cannot make yourself fall asleep. The evening hours before your usual bedtime are when sleep is hardest to reach, so an early bedtime comes after the clock has moved, not before.
Is it OK to sleep in on weekends while I fix my schedule?
Keep it within about an hour, as the NHLBI suggests. In one lab study, a free weekend after a short-sleep week left people's body clocks running later once the work week started again.
What if I need to wake up later, not earlier?
Use the same plan in the other direction: move the wake time later in small steps, then hold it. Moving later is usually the easier way. Researchers note that the body takes longer to adjust to an earlier schedule than to a later one.
Do naps undo a new sleep schedule?
Short ones usually do not. The NHLBI suggests adults nap for no more than 20 minutes. A long late nap makes the next bedtime later, which works against the plan.
Try it on my day.
Write today down in your own words, and see where the hours went.
For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.