The 5-Second Trick To Help You Sleep Throughout The Night If You Always Wake Up At 3AM

We’ve written before at HuffPost UK about how staying in bed when you jolt awake at 3am can sometimes be counterproductive. 

Sometimes, getting out of bed and reading or doing something else that distracts you from your sleep issues without getting you too revved up can be helpful. 

But it turns out that some sleep experts recommend an extra step for frequent middle-of-the-night risers such as myself. 

Clock-blocking (yes, really) could be the key to the night-long kip of our dreams, they say. 

What’s clock blocking?

It’s pretty hard to type the phrase with a straight face, but according to some studies, there could be some serious benefits to “clock blocking.” 

Looking at the time when you’ve woken up late at night can make you anxious, which spells bad news for your attempts at getting back to sleep. 

Dr Jake Deutsch told TechRadar: “Many people feel ‘pressure’ to sleep, and clocks can have a negative effect when patients are sensitive to this.” 

We all know that scrolling through TikTok at 4 am isn’t conducive to a peaceful return to sleep, part in thanks to the brightness of your phone’s light. 

But if your clock’s face is making you just as anxious, experts like Dr Deutsch and Nerina Ramlakhan, physiologist and author of Fast Asleep, Wide Awake, recommend simply locking it away.

After all, watching the time “is one of the biggest disruptors to being able to get back to sleep,” Dr Ramlakhan told The Guardian.

Dr Deautsch agreed saying: “My sleep hacks include removing clocks, making the room pitch black, cooling the environment, and taking the phone out of the bedroom.”

What if I use an alarm clock?

Maybe you’ve resorted to using an analogue alarm clock to avoid that midnight web surf many of us are guilty of. 

This is a method Dr Ramlakhan actually approves of, but recommends you “turn it away from you.” 

“It’s not important to know the time. Learn to let go,” the doctor added.

After all, even saying things like “I always wake up at 3 am and can never get back to sleep” means you may be more likely to follow that pattern when you notice the time.