How to Make Waking Up in the Dark Easier This Winter

At 6.30 on a January morning, your alarm may insist the day has started. The view from the window can make a fairly convincing case that it hasn't.

For much of the UK autumn and winter, many of us get up well before sunrise. The darkness removes one of the usual cues that the day has begun, and if you are also short of sleep, or feeling the ordinary grogginess that follows waking, the two tend to compound each other. None of this is a failure of character. It is simply a harder set of conditions — and conditions can be adjusted.

No morning routine reliably compensates for consistently not getting enough sleep. A louder alarm may get you vertical; it will not make up the difference.

The NHS recommends keeping roughly regular sleep and wake times. In practice, that means avoiding dramatic swings between weekdays and weekends — a very late Saturday lie-in tends to make Monday's alarm feel earlier than it is. How much sleep you need is individual; the more useful goal is giving yourself a consistent opportunity to get it.

Light is one of the most important environmental signals for the body's circadian system — the internal timing that helps organise sleep and wakefulness across the day.

When it is practical, getting some natural daylight after waking is worthwhile: opening the curtains once it is light, or stepping outside for a few minutes on the way to work. On the darkest mornings, ordinary indoor lighting can at least make your surroundings feel less night-like. It is worth being clear, though, that normal household lighting is not the same as clinical light therapy, and switching on a lamp does not “reset” your body clock.

A sunrise alarm, or wake-up light, gradually increases the light in the bedroom over a set period before your wake time, so the room is already brightening when the alarm sounds. Our guide to how sunrise alarm clocks work explains the idea in more detail.

Research on artificial dawn is encouraging but modest. Some small controlled studies have found improvements in how sleepy or alert people feel after waking, and fewer complaints of morning grogginess; results on objective measures such as cognitive performance have varied. It will not suit or help everyone.

Are wake-up lights actually worth it? →

The first few minutes of a dark morning are a poor time for decisions. A little preparation the evening before removes most of them.

The NHS suggests putting phones and other devices away before bed. Keeping the phone off the pillow and out of arm's reach reduces the temptation to keep scrolling at bedtime.

If your phone is also your alarm, placing it across the room has a second advantage: switching it off becomes a deliberate act that requires standing up, rather than a reflex performed without opening your eyes.

Popular sleep advice tends to treat the snooze button as a moral failing. The evidence is more nuanced than that.

One small laboratory study found that repeated snooze alarms prolonged sleep inertia — the grogginess after waking. Another controlled study, of people who habitually snooze, found that 30 minutes of snoozing cost only a modest amount of sleep, and either improved or did not affect performance on several cognitive tests immediately after getting up.

Neither study settles the matter, so Velquies won't tell you never to hit snooze. A more useful question is whether your repeated alarms genuinely help you wake, or simply stretch an unpleasant process over a longer period. If it is the latter, setting one alarm for the time you actually intend to get up may be worth trying.

A dark morning can feel oddly shapeless. A few simple, repeatable actions help give it an edge: open the curtains if daylight has arrived, put the room lighting on, get washed and dressed rather than lingering in the half-light, and settle on one straightforward first activity — making tea, feeding the cat, a short walk.

The point is not that any particular step has special properties. It is that a familiar sequence asks very little of you at a time when you have little to give.

Not every hard morning is the fault of the season. Persistent difficulty sleeping or waking, excessive sleepiness during the day, or concerns about your mood shouldn't automatically be put down to dark mornings.

If problems like these continue or affect daily life, the NHS website is a sensible starting point, and your GP can help. This article isn't a way to diagnose seasonal affective disorder, insomnia or any other condition.