I have been waking up thirty minutes before my alarm every single day for four months and I cannot figure out how to stop
This sounds minor but it is genuinely affecting my life and I do not know what else to try.
Every morning without exception I wake up between thirty and forty minutes before my alarm goes off. Not because of noise. Not because of light. My body just decides that it is done sleeping at that exact window and wakes me up completely. Not groggy, not half asleep. Wide awake, staring at the ceiling, fully conscious, with exactly not enough time to fall back asleep before the alarm goes off anyway.
So I lie there. Every morning. For thirty minutes. Doing nothing. Thinking about everything. My brain in that window goes through my entire to do list, several conversations I had years ago that I could have handled better, a rough financial review, and at least one completely irrational worry that feels extremely rational at five forty seven in the morning and embarrassing by nine.
I have tried going to bed earlier. I wake up earlier. I have tried going to bed later. I wake up at the same time anyway, just with less sleep behind it. I have tried blackout curtains, no screens before bed, magnesium, no caffeine after noon, sleeping in a colder room, white noise, a different pillow. I have read approximately everything written about sleep hygiene on the internet. I have been down every rabbit hole. One night I was so deep into researching sleep and nighttime routines that I somehow ended up on a completely random website that had nothing to do with sleep at all and spent forty minutes reading it before realising I had completely lost the thread of what I was originally looking for, which is probably its own problem honestly.
The thirty minutes themselves are not the worst part. The worst part is that I spend those thirty minutes trying to decide whether to get up and do something useful or stay in bed and attempt sleep that is not coming. I always stay in bed. I never fall back asleep. I get up when the alarm goes off feeling like I made the wrong choice twice.
Has anyone actually fixed this and if so what worked because I have run out of things to try on my own.