Hi all,

I've noticed since I hit about 32, I have trouble getting a full nights sleep lately. I'll fall asleep around 9:45-10:15, then wake up around 3AM pretty consistently.

Now to be fair, when I turned 32, I moved from a VERY physical IT job carrying a large backpack up ladders, servers up 9 flights of stairs, etc.. to a desk job. To offset that, I work out every single day for at least an hour. Still, I wake at 3AM almost every day.

I gave up alcohol/caffeine for a few weeks to see if that was the issue, absolutely no change at all. I wake up feeling perfectly fine but it's like i'm wired and ready to start the day, even though work isn't for another 3-4 hours. No kids either.

Pretty much the only days this doesn't happen, is unusually long exhausting days (Example, moving day where I woke up at 5AM and was lifting heavy boxes until 10PM) where basically I'm working myself to the point of almost collapsing.


38 comments

  1. Here’s an original copy of /u/thebigbread42’s post (if available):

    Hi all,

    I’ve noticed since I hit about 32, I have trouble getting a full nights sleep lately. I’ll fall asleep around 9:45-10:15, then wake up around 3AM pretty consistently.

    Now to be fair, when I turned 32, I moved from a VERY physical IT job carrying a large backpack up ladders, servers up 9 flights of stairs, etc.. to a desk job. To offset that, I work out every single day for at least an hour. Still, I wake at 3AM almost every day.

    I gave up alcohol/caffeine for a few weeks to see if that was the issue, absolutely no change at all. I wake up feeling perfectly fine but it’s like i’m *wired* and ready to start the day, even though work isn’t for another 3-4 hours. No kids either.

    Pretty much the only days this doesn’t happen, is unusually long exhausting days (Example, moving day where I woke up at 5AM and was lifting heavy boxes until 10PM) where basically I’m working myself to the point of almost collapsing.

    *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskMenOver30) if you have any questions or concerns.*

  2. It’s a cortisol spike.

    During times of stress in my life, 3 a.m. becomes my wake time. Like wide awake time.

    I did some research and for me it was stress related, and for some reason the body just spikes stress hormones at that time of the night.

    Do you feel like you’ve been “on” for a very long time, work with any new douchebags, have a wife or kids who take up a lot of mental load, sick parents?

    Theres something inside you that’s not allowing you to rest properly, I don’t think it’s just age.

  3. It sounds like it is time to up the weight at the gym. Sleep is the time of day where memory and muscle is built. If the body feels like it accomplished that at 3 AM, your body will wake you up.

    The alternative is drugs. They’re awesome, but addictive.

  4. 37, I wake up constantly in the night. Sometimes I sleep through and it feels great but multiple nights a week I’ll wake up at intervals throughout the night, sometimes I’ll be awake for an hour or more trying to fall back asleep, and at least once a week I just won’t sleep, like a full night of insomina or maybe 2-3 hours.

    That was the usual before the birth of my son, and we are cosleeping at the moment as he appears to have inherited my restlessness. so, my sleep is even worse, though at least I’ve had years of being used to be tired.

  5. I recently discovered that the reason why I wasn’t sleeping soundly through the night was because I was taking a B vitamin complex with relatively high doses of B6 and B12. Changing to a multivitamin that contained lower doses of B6 and B12 and now I sleep like a stone.

    I even experimented with this: there is a direct correlation between taking one multivitamin with 588% RDA of B6 and 12500% of B12 and me not sleeping that night, and another containing 176% RDA of B6 and 1024% of B12 and sleeping soundly through the night. And the effect is reproducible, and the excess B vitamins appear to clear after a day, so I can alternate between one and another and see a strong correlation with my sleep patterns as tracked on an Apple Watch. (The difference is about 1 hour of actual sleep during 8 1/2 hours of bed time.)

    Are you taking any multivitamins?

  6. Thats the story of my life and got worst as I got older and have to wake up 2 x a night to pee.

  7. Cortisol spike. Just went through that for the last year because of a lawsuit and tons of other shit.

    Ive also been sleeping in a different bed than my gfs and now i sleep 10 to 6 non stop.

  8. Spent my entire 20s, averaging 4 hrs of sleep. I think I’ve started to sleep more in my 30s than most of my life.

  9. If you were drinking every day, you have to quit alcohol for much longer than a few weeks for your cortisol to normalize. Also, get your blood sugar checked if you don’t eat super clean. Diabetes or pre-diabetes has even more fun interactions with that morning cortisol spike.

  10. My sleep has definitely changed over the past 18 months. Changing job roles (I now WFH 80%+ of the time) and moving in with my girlfriend have both definitely played a role.

    I used to go to bed about 12am-1am and get up around 8am-8.30am. I now aim to get up at 6am and usually go to bed anywhere between 9.30pm-11pm. I’ve made a conscious effort to improve my general health/sleep over the past year; I’ve cut down on alcohol majorly, I go to the gym 3-5 mornings a week (6.30am) and I make a point of reading a book for half an hour before bed.

    I don’t have much trouble falling asleep, but I still find myself waking up at 4am-ish most mornings.

  13. Early morning wakeups like that are often stress or cortisol related even if you don’t feel stressed. Desk jobs can mess with that more than people expect.

  14. My partner was saying this the other night and I simply asked what are you anxious about in your life currently? It turned out it was work.

  15. Go to bed later if you can. I make it a point to actually be sleepy when I go to bed rather than at a set time otherwise I’m waking up at 3 am or 4 am too.

  16. I usually “solve” this by just not being able to fall asleep until 2 or 3 a.m.

    I probably need to start getting more than four or five hours of sleep per night, though…

  17. I haven’t slept properly since my first kid was born.  The slightest thing wakes me up “just in case”.

  18. Nope no issues for me. My body only needs 5-6 hours of sleep. I get up at 5 every day. On the weekends I may sleep till 7-730. All depends on when I go to bed. It’s an internal alarm. Your body knows when to wake up all on its own.

  19. Stress, lack of exercise, sleep apnea, ptsd, anxiety, and substance abuse are usually the culprits.

  21. Pretty much the same here, but struggled with sleep my whole life as well. Only things that’s helped consistently for me is combining these:

    * exercise needs to be vigorous. Weight lifting isn’t enough, has to be hard cardio (stairmaster), my guess is the more ATP = more adenosine build up for sleep
    * sleeping earlier – I can’t sleep in, or it’s just bad fragmented sleep after typical wake time
    * bed jet – temp control for coolness helps overheating and staying warm
    * weed gummies – gives just a little extra sedation to get through the. Supposedly doesn’t last but has been decently consistently helpful
    * UBlockout shades. 100% blackout + blackout stickers, they let the tiniest amount of light through on Leds

    Pick and choose what might help.

    Earlier sleep, exercise and bedjet are IMO the current biggest helpful impacts

  23. yeah I tend toward falling asleep easily but waking up around 3-4 AM.

    I’ve found it’s highly diet dependent. If I have a lot of carbs or alcohol for dinner it’s usually way worse. When I eat a low carb dinner (some chicken and roasted veggies with no rice, potatoes, or bread) it’s usually much less of an issue.

  24. 39. Honestly I think I’d have the same problems if I got a desk job. I’ve only ever worked on my feet. I’ve been a factory rat since 2009, a CNC machinist since mid 2010. I sleep from 9:30p-5:30a pretty consistently. I have difficulty in the summer when it’s light until late, but that’s the northern US with stupid DST. 

    Married, no children. I have the luxury of prioritizing sleep. I do all the essentials: extremely dim anti blue light phone 7pm-6am, totally black blacked out room with no TV, I eat dinner at least 3 hours before bed if I can, limit my intake of liquids in the afternoon/evening so I don’t have to pee at night, I do use caffeine, but I limit it to one cup exactly at 7:00am, which allows for 14-15 hours to elapse between caffeine and sleep. Honestly I think the caffeine crash helps me conk out. I strength train three days a week, eat a wide variety of foods high in fiber, primarily plants but some meats, i take magnesium glycinate, D3, fish oil, l-theanine, zinc. 

    it still absolutely sucks to get up at 5:30 every week day. It was easier when I did zero caffeine. In my experience it took longer than three weeks off the caffeine to really notice the benefits. It was more like three months to where everything normalized chemically. Same with alcohol. I also quit alcohol Eleven years ago. It takes really about three months to feel like “fully detoxed” after quitting alcohol. 

    Good luck. Sleeping poorly is such a scourge on modern humanity. I hope you can make it better. I suggest completely quitting alcohol and caffeine for at least three months, and everything else I mentioned. 

  25. I used to have bad sleeping issues. It runs in my family I think. Changing my diet significantly was the only thing that helped. I limited caffeine, cut out sugar, fast food, alcohol, etc. And starting eating fruits, vegetables, etc.

  26. How is your weight? If you sit in front of screens and have an anxiety box in your pocket, it can harm your sleep cycle. You may also want to get a sleep study done. Sleep apnea starts to hit people.

    I found out I don’t sleep as well in my mid 30s. My testosterone levels dropped suddenly in my 30s, and my cortisol levels spiked. Diet became a lot more important. The biggest improvement was getting an apple watch to track my sleep. I realized my wife was waking me up 3-4 times a night with noises she would make. Moved her to another room and my sleep cycle is back to normal REM sleep.

  27. I got you fam – no screen time one hour before sleep, magnesium, black out certain, new mattress, make sure you are drinking enough water.

  28. I’m mid-50s now. Many years ago I was down to 3 hours of sleep a night. Oddly enough, I was fine all day long. No nodding off, even in the most boring of meetings.

    But tossing and turning for 5 hours and only sleeping for 3 sucked ass. And not a straight 3 hours, 20 minutes here, toss and turn, maybe 30 minutes, more tossing and turning, etc.

    I then bought Costco’s over the counter (OTC) sleep aid. one pill got me 8 hours of sleep for a long time. then 1.5, then 2. Then I went to the Dr and got a prescription. That worked for a while, but now I take two of the prescription and two of the OTC and I’m around 7 hours a night. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

    I think I’ve been taking sleep aids nightly for 6 years now. My Dr knows how much stuff I take.

  29. It was 40 for me. At 39 I was getting in shape and it gave me a lot of energy. Too much energy to sleep. I have rarely slept through the night since. Luckily I work as a server and bartender so I rarely have to be anywhere until evening and can just take naps.

  31. I usually have to get up once a night since my 30’s to pee. But then I usually have a very hard time to get back to sleep. It’s normally stress related from work. I went to doctor about the pee part, they gave me different meds and none made a different but stopped some leakage at least. After 4 or 5 days of sleeping like crap, I take a sleep aide, that knocks me out for the night. I prefer not to take every night and become dependent on them. I tried weed, it helps to a point and alocohol only makes me pee more.

  33. I haven’t had a real, restorative nights sleep since I was like 19. Permanent sinus problems will do that to you, lol.

  36. People saying cortisol spike tell me why its the same with me being absolutly extremly happy. Its just aging, relax

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