Terminal insomnia, also called late insomnia, is a frustrating condition where you can usually easily fall asleep when you go to bed … but then wake up four to five hours later, unable to go back to sleep. Therefore, you get up too early in the morning, leaving you exhausted, hazy, and in a bad mood when you get out of bed to start the day. Despite the sinister sounding name, terminal insomnia won’t kill you, but it can certainly kill the joy.

To begin with a cure for terminal insomnia, it is important to determine how many hours of sleep you really need to fully rest at night. Unlike initial insomnia (not being able to fall asleep for hours after going to bed) and intermediate insomnia (waking up in the middle of the night and taking hours to go back to sleep) where all symptoms clearly point to the condition, some people who think they have terminal insomnia may 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 fewer hours of sleep than some of your friends and family, you may not be experiencing late insomnia symptoms, just going to bed too early for the amount of sleep you need.

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

However, if you have never had little sleep and are now becoming more and more exhausted after these short hours of sleep, it is very possible that you are 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 is critical before treatment.

Start with the emotional causes of insomnia

To help you discover the causes of your late or terminal insomnia, keep a sleep diary for about two weeks. In this journal 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 cannot go back to sleep. Because the emotional reasons behind your inability to sleep may be somewhat hidden, possibly subconscious, it is important to fully analyze the situation. Don’t skip this step!

I have found that initial insomnia, in which you cannot fall asleep when you first go to bed, is often associated with feelings of fear, stress, worry, and anxiety. Initial insomniacs may even experience anxiety during sleep when 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 cannot relax physically or mentally enough to fall asleep.

People with mild or terminal insomnia, however, tend more toward feelings of depression, anger, and frustration. These emotions do not trigger an 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 aware of them at all. 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 the possible physical causes of your delayed insomnia with the help of your sleep diary. If you wake up generally at the same time every morning, there may be a physical reason or a combination of several physical reasons why this happens.

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