Is It Better to Wake Up Early or Sleep Longer as You Get Older? Experts Explain

But if the decision on when to get up is yours alone, is it better for your health to rise early or get more rest? Here’s what sleep medicine specialists want you to keep in mind.

This can be “tricky” to answer, according to Jade Wu, Ph.D., a behavioral sleep medicine specialist and author of Hello Sleep: The Science and Art of Overcoming Insomnia Without Medications. “Sometimes waking up early means someone is not getting enough opportunity to sleep, and sometimes it doesn’t,” she says. “Whether this is a good thing also depends on whether you usually get up early or late.”

Dr. Winter agrees. “I don’t really care if you get up later, but I want you to have a wake-up time and decide that is the wake-up time, no matter what happens overnight,” he says. “I just want it to be consistent and in line with what your body naturally wants to do, which is to sleep for seven to nine hours.”

Some people may naturally prefer to stay up later at night, which would push the preferred wake time to later, Dr. Winter points out. But if you like to get in bed on the earlier side, your wake time should reflect that.

To figure out if an earlier or later wake time is best for you, Wu recommends considering these elements:

• Make sure you’re leaving yourself enough time to sleep. The recommended amount is seven or more hours.
• Keep your wake time steady. “It’s better to wake up at about the same time every day than to sometimes wake up early and sometimes late,” she says. A consistent wake time helps to anchor your circadian rhythm, which dictates the timing of a lot of processes in your body.
• Line up your wake time with your chronotype, which is your body’s natural preference for sleep and wake times. “If you’re naturally a morning person, get up early,” Wu says. “If you’re naturally more of a night owl, let yourself sleep.”

Most people need less sleep with age—and that’s something that’s been happening since you were a baby. “Babies need much more sleep than toddlers, who need more sleep than other children,” Dr. Winter says. “The underlying reason is that we tend to lose slow-wave sleep or deep sleep as we get older.”

But there is some variability here. “It also depends on our physical activity levels, stress levels, and hormonal status,” Wu says. So, if you work out regularly and aren’t overly stressed, you may require more sleep than your frazzled counterparts who do less activity on a regular basis. “Each person’s trajectory of sleep needs can be unique,” Dr. Wu says.

Every person is different, but your chronotype plays a role. “Our chronotypes—the tendency for our circadian clock to run early, late, or somewhere in between—tend to shift earlier as we age,” Wu says.

But while doctors know that people tend to wake up earlier as they age, Dr. Winter says the exact reason is unknown.

Dr. Winter recommends seeing a doctor about your sleep anytime you’re concerned about it. But he also notes a few “red flags” to keep in mind.

Those include:

• Feeling like you need far more sleep when you’re older than you did when you were younger.
• You have fragmented sleep.
• You experience excessive sleepiness during the day.
• Your partner says you snore consistently.

Frequent nightmares are also a reason to check in with a healthcare provider, Wu says. As for whether you should get up earlier or later, Dr. Winter says it’s really up to you—as long as you’re consistent.