What time should I go to bed if I wake up at 1:00 am?

Waking at 1:00 am is a night-shift or early-flight schedule, and the arithmetic does not care: five cycles still means lights out at 5:15 pm, which for most people is the previous afternoon.

Why three times and not one

5:15 pm buys five cycles (7 h 30 min). If you can manage 3:45 pm, that is six cycles and 9 h — the top of the range the NSF panel recommends for adults. The 6:45 pm option is 6 h: enough to get through the day, not enough to do it twice.

Sleep moves from light sleep into deep sleep and then REM, and one pass takes about 90 minutes — anywhere from 70 to 120 depending on the person and the point in the night. That spread is why these are windows, not appointments.

In clock terms: lights out 5:15 pm, asleep around 5:30 pm, deepest sleep of the night between roughly 5:50 pm and 7:00 pm, the night's midpoint at 9:15 pm, and REM building toward 12:25 am. The 1:00 am alarm lands as cycle 5 closes, so you are likely in light sleep rather than deep.

All bedtimes for a 1:00 am alarm

Formula: bedtime = wake time − (cycles × 90 min) − 15 min · adult range from the NSF 2015 panel and the AASM/SRS 2015 consensus · methodology

If you can't fall asleep by 5:15 pm

If 5:15 pm comes and your mind is still running, aim for the next cycle boundary at 6:45 pm instead of counting the minutes. Ten to twenty minutes to fall asleep is normal; much longer, repeatedly, is worth a conversation with a clinician rather than a calculator.

Try a different time