Circadian nutritionist Adriano dos Santos on why early mornings feel so hard, and how to shift your body clock without losing sleep.
Key Takeaways
Waking up early feels hard because your circadian system decides when your body is ready to be alert. Willpower rarely overrides biology for long.
Consistent wake time and morning bright-light exposure are the two highest-leverage moves. Nothing else comes close.
Never cut total sleep to wake up earlier. You trade one problem for a worse one.
Shift your schedule gradually. Fifteen to thirty minutes every few days is the ceiling.
The evening decides the morning. Wind-down, dim light, no screens close to bed, no late heavy meals.
Adriano is a practitioner-researcher specialising in circadian rhythms, chrononutrition, gut microbiome, and sleep medicine, with clinics in London, The Hague, and Dubai. He holds a BSc in Nutrition Science and a Master's in Sleep Medicine from Bern University Hospital under Professor Claudio Bassetti, and has published peer-reviewed research in journals including Nutrients and Frontiers in Physiology. His clinical work bridges rigorous circadian and microbiome science with measurable, evidence-based protocols for metabolic health, sleep, and cognition.
Struggling to get out of bed isn't a discipline problem. It's a body-clock problem. Here's how to shift your routine using science-backed habits that improve sleep quality and make mornings genuinely easier, without sacrificing rest.
A client came to me last winter. Mid-thirties, senior operations role at a Rotterdam logistics firm. She'd read a book about the 5am club and decided she was going to become a 5am person. She lasted eleven days. By day twelve she was falling asleep at her desk, catching a cold, and blaming her willpower. That was her opening line to me: "I don't have discipline."
She had plenty of discipline. What she didn't have was a plan that respected her biology.
Waking up early is one of the most misunderstood problems in modern wellness. Most of the advice you'll read frames it as a character issue. Get tougher. Cut caffeine. Ignore your alarm. The neuroscience says something different. Your body decides when it's ready to be alert. That decision is made by a small cluster of neurons in your hypothalamus called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, and it's tuned by light, timing, and consistency. Beside these neurons, your genetics play a role here too. So it isn't your willpower.
This piece is about how to work with that system instead of fighting it. And how to make mornings genuinely easier without pulling from the very thing that makes them feel good, which is enough sleep.
Your circadian system runs on a roughly 24-hour cycle. It's anchored by the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), the master clock in the hypothalamus, which takes light cues from specialised photoreceptors in the retina and uses them to set the timing of everything downstream: hormone release, core body temperature, digestion, alertness, sleep pressure. ⊕
Two hormones matter most for waking. Melatonin rises in the evening, peaks in the middle of the night, and falls before you wake. Cortisol does the opposite. It hits a sharp peak in the first thirty to forty-five minutes after waking, called the cortisol awakening response, which is what gives you that "I can face the day" feeling. ⊕ If your circadian system is misaligned, both curves shift. Melatonin lingers into the morning. Cortisol peaks late. You wake up feeling like you're moving through wet concrete because, biologically, you are.
Then there's sleep inertia. If your alarm goes off during deep NREM sleep, you'll feel disoriented, clumsy, and groggy for up to thirty minutes. Waking from lighter sleep stages is much easier. This is why the same amount of total sleep can leave you feeling brilliant one morning and demolished the next. It's not the hours. It's the sleep stage you woke from.
The consensus from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the National Sleep Foundation is 7 to 9 hours for adults, with 6 hours as the absolute floor before health markers start to deteriorate. ⊕ ⊕ This isn't a preference. It's a physiological requirement, similar to needing water and food.
There is some individual variation. A minority of people function well on 6 to 6.5 hours long-term. But the research is consistent: most of the people who claim to thrive on 5 hours are running a permanent sleep deficit they've grown used to. They interpret their compensatory adrenal drive as "energy." Take them off caffeine for a week and they collapse.
Here's the trade-off nobody in the 5am club will tell you about honestly. If you're currently sleeping from 11pm to 7am (eight hours) and you want to wake at 5am, you have two options. Move bedtime to 9pm, which for most working adults with any social or family life is unrealistic. Or cut two hours of sleep, which downgrades cognition, mood, immune function, glucose tolerance, and body composition over weeks.
Move your wake time in fifteen to thirty minute increments every three to four days. If you currently wake at 7am and want to wake at 6am, don't jump to 6am on Monday. Try 6:45 for a few days, then 6:30, then 6:15, then 6:00. The whole shift takes two to three weeks. Your circadian system can advance about that fast, no faster.
Move bedtime by the same increment on the same day. Wake time and bedtime shift together, or the whole system just accumulates sleep debt.
Same wake time every day of the week. Including Saturday. Including Sunday. This is the single most powerful move most people never make.
Consistency of wake time anchors the entire circadian system more reliably than consistency of bedtime, because wake time is when your body meets light and starts the melatonin countdown for that night. If your wake time varies by more than an hour across the week, your body is essentially flying to a different timezone every weekend, a phenomenon called social jetlag. ⊕ Long-term, it's associated with higher fatigue, worse metabolic markers, and lower mood.
Light within the first thirty to sixty minutes of waking is the single most powerful cue your circadian system receives. It anchors the SCN, suppresses residual melatonin, and calibrates the timing of your next night's sleep. ⊕
The intensity matters. Indoor light is around 200 to 500 lux. A cloudy day outdoors is around 10,000 lux. Direct sunlight is 50,000 to 100,000 lux. Even ten minutes outside in the morning is worth more than an hour under office lighting.
Winter in Northern Europe and some other places in the world is a real challenge. If you live above roughly 50 degrees latitude, sunrise in December may be after your commute is done. In that case, a 10,000-lux therapy light for 20 to 30 minutes at breakfast is well-evidenced and clinically effective. Get one that's certified for circadian therapy, sit within 30 to 50 cm of it while you eat, and don't stare at it directly.
Snoozing is one of the worst habits in modern sleep. Each snooze cycle drops you back into fragmented sleep for another eight or nine minutes, then jars you awake again during a lighter phase. You end up more disoriented, not less. The extra fifteen minutes of low-quality dozing costs you clarity for an hour afterwards.
Kids waking you up. You can't control this. What you can control is your wake time when the kids don't wake you. Same wake time on weekends, even after a broken night, usually stabilises your rhythm faster than trying to catch up on lost sleep.
Shift work. Real shift work is a different problem that this piece can't solve. If you're a rotating shift worker, the priorities become anchor sleep, strategic light exposure, and controlled meal timing. A health practitioner who specialises in circadian medicine can help.
Insomnia. If you're chronically unable to fall asleep or stay asleep for four weeks or more, don't just tighten your morning routine. See a sleep clinician. Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is the first-line evidence-based treatment, and it outperforms sleep medication long-term.
Late caffeine. Caffeine has a half-life of five to six hours and sometimes even longer depending on your genetics. A 3pm coffee is still half-active in your brain at 9pm. ⊕ If you're struggling to fall asleep, cutting caffeine after noon is the first intervention, before you consider anything else.
If you wake up feeling like your brain is buffering, you're experiencing sleep inertia. It's normal. It usually clears in 15 to 30 minutes for most adults, longer if you woke from deep sleep or you're sleep-deprived.
Movement helps. Even walking around the flat, opening curtains, and light stretching accelerates the transition out of the sleep state. Cold water on the face works through vagal-nerve activation. A short walk outside in real morning light does more than any of the "morning routine hacks" you'll see online.
Hydration matters more than most people give it credit for. You've been asleep for seven hours without water. A large glass of water in the first ten minutes of waking supports blood volume and cerebral perfusion, both of which are relevant to alertness.
Coffee is fine. The delayed-caffeine advice you may have seen ("wait 90 minutes for adenosine to clear") is thinly evidenced. Have your coffee when you want it in the morning. What matters much more is not having it after noon.
Whatever else you do, get outside for light. If you take one thing from this article, take that one.
Give yourself three weeks minimum before you judge whether a new sleep-wake pattern works. Circadian systems take that long to fully re-anchor.
Track wake time, not bedtime. Bedtime naturally follows wake time and light exposure. Trying to force yourself to sleep at 10pm when your body isn't ready produces frustration and revenge scrolling. Focus on being up at the same time seven days a week and let bedtime settle.
Compliance beats perfection. A perfect Monday morning routine means little if Tuesday through Sunday are chaos. What the body responds to is the average of the whole week.
You will fail some weeks. Travel, illness, kids, work crises. When you do, don't rebuild from scratch. Just come back to your wake time the next day. Consistency of return matters more than never breaking.
Foundational habits sit under all of this. Enough water, spread across the day. Regular meal timing. Enough of the micronutrients your energy metabolism depends on, from real food or a well-formulated foundation if diet is inconsistent. Enough movement in daylight. None of it is glamorous. All of it is what makes waking up early sustainable, week after week, when the initial motivation has faded.
Because your body clock, not your alarm, decides when you're ready to be alert. If your circadian system has settled into a later rhythm, your melatonin is still elevated when the alarm goes off, and your cortisol awakening response is delayed. Add poor sleep quality on top and you're trying to wake from a state your biology hasn't yet exited. It feels like weakness. It's actually mistiming.
Shift gradually. Move your wake time by fifteen to thirty minutes every three to four days, and move your bedtime the same amount at the same time. Anchor the whole shift with morning light, ideally outdoors, in the first hour of waking. Keep the wake time consistent seven days a week, including weekends. Give the whole system three weeks to re-anchor before deciding whether it's working.
Not inherently. It makes you more productive if your body is genuinely aligned with an early rhythm and you're getting enough sleep to support it. It reduces productivity if you're forcing your biology against your chronotype or losing hours of rest to get up earlier. The productivity gains claimed by 4am influencers are usually the result of getting to work before interruptions start, which you could equally get by protecting a distraction-free morning at any hour that suits your biology.
Chronotype adds another layer. Some people are genuinely wired to be evening types, and forcing them into an early-morning schedule doesn't reset their biology, it just chronically stresses it. ⊕ The 4am productivity culture that dominates parts of LinkedIn is, in my clinical view, a public health issue. It normalises chronic sleep debt. It confuses discipline with metabolic damage. It treats a personal biological trait as a character flaw. If you're a natural night owl trying to force yourself into a 5am wake, you may improve for a while, but you'll probably plateau, then regress, then wonder what's wrong with you. The answer is nothing. The plan was wrong.
This is exactly why I built the Circadian Health Assessment, and it's free to take. It runs on the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (Horne and Östberg, 1976), the validated instrument sleep researchers have leaned on for nearly fifty years, and in under 15 minutes it tells you where you actually sit: Early Lark, Evening Owl, or somewhere in between. It estimates your personal melatonin onset and your "sleep gate," the window when your brain is biologically primed for sleep, then maps your best times to eat, move, focus, and wind down against your own hormone curves. It gives you a social jetlag score too, the gap between the schedule your biology wants and the one your calendar imposes. And it's the front door to something bigger we're building: the Circadian Health Index, a framework we are developing actually to score human circadian health rather than just describe it. So before you decide how early you can realistically wake, find out what you're working with. You can take it at adsvitality.com/chronotype-test. It's free access.
That said, chronotype isn't a prison. It's a range. Most people can shift their body clock by an hour or two if they do it properly. The question isn't whether you can wake up earlier. The question is how far you can move without breaking the system you're working with.
The right way to wake earlier is to shift the whole window earlier. Not to shrink it.
Weekend lie-ins feel wonderful. They also make Monday harder than it needs to be. If you want mornings to become easy, protect your wake time seven days a week.
Cool. Dark. Quiet.
Bedroom temperature between 16 and 19 degrees Celsius is optimal for most adults. Blackout blinds if you have any external light pollution. A good eye mask works well too. White noise or a fan if your street is loud. Phone out of the room, or at least out of arm's reach and face-down on silent.
None of this is glamorous. All of it works.
The two hours before bed should look like the biology says they should: dim, calm, low-input. Overhead bright lights off. Warm-toned lamps only. Screens dimmed to their lowest brightness and blue-light filters on, though the honest answer is that reduced screen time matters more than screen filters. No high-intensity exercise after 8pm. No heavy meals close to bed.
Alcohol deserves a special mention. It sedates you initially but fragments REM sleep in the second half of the night, so you wake feeling unrested even after seven hours in bed. Two glasses of wine at 9pm can measurably wreck a whole night. The evidence is unambiguous on this. Most patients don't want to hear it.
Set the alarm for the actual time you need to wake up. Put it across the room. Get up on the first ring.
Make the first thirty minutes require no decisions.
Water on the bedside table for immediate hydration. Clothes laid out the night before. A five-minute routine you don't have to think about: shower, dress, coffee, walk outside for light, and go. The point isn't to be productive at 6am. The point is to reduce the willpower cost of getting out of bed to as close to zero as possible.
Decision fatigue is real. The fewer choices you have to make in your first half-hour, the more you can protect your morning momentum.
Late heavy dinner. Eating within two to three hours of bed disrupts circadian metabolism and fragments early-night sleep. If you want mornings to feel easier, an earlier dinner is one of the quiet upgrades most people never try.
Alcohol. Already covered. It's worse than most people realise.
Between one and three weeks for most people, depending on how large a shift you're making and how consistently you protect it. A one-hour shift typically anchors in about ten days. Larger shifts take longer. The circadian system moves at a limited speed, which is why gradual is faster in the long run than sudden.
First check the basics. Are you getting seven to nine hours of sleep, going to bed at a consistent time, avoiding alcohol close to bed, and cutting caffeine after noon? Are you getting bright light in the first hour of waking? If those are in place and you're still exhausted for more than a few weeks, please see a clinician. Persistent morning fatigue can flag thyroid dysfunction, iron deficiency, sleep apnoea, or other conditions that need proper diagnosis.
