What time should I go to bed if I wake up at 11:00 pm?

Waking at 11:00 pm is a night-shift schedule: sleep runs through the day, with lights out at 3:15 pm for five cycles or 1:45 pm for six.

Why three times and not one

The middle option, 3:15 pm, is five cycles and 7 h 30 min of actual sleep; 1:45 pm is six cycles and 9 h. Both sit inside the adult range. The 4:45 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.

Here is the shape of the night. You settle at 3:15 pm and are asleep by 3:30 pm; the first and deepest slow-wave stretch arrives near 3:50 pm; by 7:15 pm you are halfway through; from about 10:25 pm the final REM period runs up to the 11:00 pm alarm. Cut the night short and that last REM block is what goes.

All bedtimes for a 11:00 pm alarm

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

11:00 pm: getting up when everyone else goes to bed

An 11:00 pm alarm is the mirror image of an ordinary day. Lights out at 3:15 pm gives five cycles; 1:45 pm gives six; 4:45 pm, four. It fits a shift that starts at midnight or 1 am and ends mid-morning, and it fits a night you only have to do once: a 2 am airport run or an overnight drive.

The arithmetic is kind to the work and unkind to the rest of life. You have been awake only 8 hours at 7 am, so the end-of-night sleepiness the shift-work reviews describe mostly arrives after you have finished. But a 3:15 pm bedtime puts the last coffee at 9:15 am, makes lunch your supper, and spends the evening, when family and friends are free, asleep. If you share a home, the practical points are a meal together around 2 pm, a bedroom that is dark at 3 pm in July, and an agreement about noise between 5 and 9 pm, which is the middle of your night: with lights out at 3:15 pm, the deepest sleep comes before about 6:30 pm and the long REM periods fall in the last two hours before 11:00 pm. For a single night, do not try to sleep five cycles cold. Wake two hours early that morning, eat lunch, and aim for 4:45 pm; four cycles you actually sleep are worth more than five spent looking at the ceiling.

Every alarm in the 11 pm hour

Lights-out times for each alarm · last coffee = six hours before the five-cycle bedtime (Drake 2013) · full grid on the open data page

If you can't fall asleep by 3:15 pm

Two things stretch the fifteen minutes most people need to drop off: caffeine within six hours of 3:15 pm (that is 9:15 am), and a screen in the last hour. If neither applies and you are still awake twenty minutes in, get up for a while rather than lying there, and come back for the 4:45 pm window.

Try a different time