Terminal insomnia, also called late-onset insomnia, is a frustrating condition where you can usually easily fall asleep when you go to bed…but then wake up four or five hours later, unable to go back to sleep. So you wake up way too early in the morning, leaving you feeling exhausted, confused and cranky when you get out of bed to start your day. Despite the ominous-sounding name, terminal insomnia won’t kill you, but it can certainly kill the joy.

To get started on a cure for terminal insomnia, it’s important to determine how much sleep you really need to get a full night’s rest. Unlike early insomnia (not being able to fall asleep for hours after going to bed) and mild insomnia (waking up in the middle of the night and taking hours to get back to sleep) where all the symptoms clearly point to the condition, some people who they think they have terminal insomnia could simply be “short sleepers.”

And what does that mean? Well, some people only need four or five hours of sleep to function properly during the day. If you’ve always been able to feel good on less sleep than some of your friends and family, you may not be experiencing late-onset insomnia symptoms—you may simply be going to bed too early for the amount of sleep you need.

If that’s the case, your feeling tired and cranky could be the result of staying awake too long, beating yourself up because you can’t get back to sleep. He tries to go to bed later so that he wakes up at a more reasonable time and can get up and start his day right away. And then be grateful to have a few extra hours in your day to do more than sleep!

However, if you have never slept poorly and now find yourself increasingly exhausted after these few hours of sleep, you may very well be experiencing terminal insomnia. As you would with any other type of insomnia, once you’ve determined that you have terminal insomnia, it’s time to find out why. You can’t fight an unknown force, so understanding the causes of your condition comes before treatment.

Start with the emotional causes of insomnia

To help you discover the causes of your terminal or late-onset insomnia, keep a sleep journal for about two weeks. In this diary you will write your thoughts and feelings when you wake up in the morning. This can help you determine if there are emotional reasons why you can’t go back to sleep. Because the emotional reasons behind your inability to sleep may be somewhat hidden, possibly subconscious, it’s important to fully analyze the situation. Don’t skip this step!

I’ve found that early insomnia, where you can’t fall asleep when you first go to bed, is often associated with feelings of fear, stress, worry, and anxiety. Early insomniacs may even experience sleep anxiety where they cannot sleep because they are so focused on falling asleep. These emotional causes of insomnia tend to make your body tense and restless, so you can’t relax physically or mentally enough to fall asleep.

However, people with mild or terminal insomnia are more prone to feelings of depression, anger, and frustration. These emotions do not trigger the adrenaline rush in the same way as anxiety and worry. They also tend to be pushed further into the subconscious mind, where we are not very aware of them. But they can gnaw at the back of our minds and wake us up in the middle of the night.

physical causes

You can also determine possible physical causes of your late-onset insomnia with the help of your sleep diary. If you generally wake up at the same time every morning, there may be a physical reason or a combination of several physical reasons why this is happening.

For example, if you have a thermostat set to change the temperature at that specific time, this change could be waking you up. Does his neighbor go to work at that time and turn on a bright light that shines in his bedroom window? Is there an increase in outside noise, such as more traffic or a dog barking? Maybe his allergies are flaring up right now. Some allergy sufferers find that the hours before sunrise are the worst. By determining the cause or causes of your insomnia, you can determine ways to cure the symptoms.