Jera

How to wake up early when you’re a night owl

By Ramit Mehra, Health Content Advisor · October 5, 2026

You’ve got a new job that starts at 8. You go to bed at 11 like a responsible adult, stare at the ceiling until 2, and then your alarm goes off at 6:30 like a fire drill. By 10 p.m. you’re wide awake again, and the cycle repeats.

If that’s you, you’re probably a night owl, and you’re in good company. You’re also not stuck: the timing of your body clock can move, and there’s a small but well-run trial showing how.

In short: being a night owl is partly built in, but light and routine shape it too. In a three-week trial, night owls who woke 2 to 3 hours earlier, got morning daylight, avoided bright evenings, kept regular meal times, and kept the same schedule on weekends shifted their sleep about two hours earlier without losing sleep. And it only works if you keep it up at weekends.

Are night owls real, or just undisciplined?

Real. Your chronotype, whether you naturally lean early or late, reflects the timing of your internal body clock.

Part of it is genetic. A study of nearly 700,000 people found 351 regions of the genome linked to being a morning person.1 But the effect of genes alone is modest: people carrying the most “morning” variants slept on average just 25 minutes earlier than those carrying the fewest.

Part of it is age. In a survey of about 25,000 people, chronotype got steadily later through the teenage years, peaked at around 19.5 for women and 21 for men, and then drifted earlier again for the rest of life.2 If you’re in your early twenties, your body clock is at its latest.

And a big part is your light. When researchers took people camping with only natural light, their body clocks moved earlier, and the night owls moved the most, ending up more like early types.3 Little daylight in the morning and bright screens and lamps late at night push most people’s clocks later than they would otherwise be.

That last part is the good news. You can’t change your genes or your age, but you can change your light.

Can a night owl become a morning person?

You probably won’t turn into someone who bounces out of bed at 5 a.m. But you can move your schedule a meaningful amount earlier.

The clearest evidence comes from a 2019 randomized trial at the University of Birmingham.4 Twenty-two night owls, who typically fell asleep between about 1:30 and 3 a.m., were split into two groups. One group followed a set of practical instructions for three weeks; the other got a single instruction about lunch time. Everyone wore an activity monitor, kept a sleep diary and gave saliva samples to measure their body-clock hormones.

After three weeks, the group that followed the plan was falling asleep about 1¾ hours earlier and waking up about 2 hours earlier, with no drop in how long they slept. Their body-clock markers, the timing of the sleep hormone melatonin and the morning rise of cortisol, moved about 2 hours earlier too, so it wasn’t just willpower: the clock itself had shifted.

Bar chart of the average time people fell asleep and woke up, measured with activity monitors. The group that followed the earlier schedule slept from 2:46 to 10:31 a.m. before, and from 1:03 to 8:36 a.m. after three weeks. The comparison group slept from 1:37 to 9:37 a.m. before, and from 2:47 to 10:51 a.m. after.
Average time falling asleep and waking up, from activity monitors, before and after three weeks. 12 people followed the earlier schedule; 10 in the comparison group didn’t. Data: Facer-Childs et al., Sleep Medicine, 2019.

Mornings changed too. At 8 a.m., the group felt significantly less sleepy than before, reacted faster on an attention test, and had a stronger grip. They also scored lower for stress and depression on a questionnaire.

The comparison group, meanwhile, drifted later over the same weeks, which is a fair picture of what tends to happen without a plan.

The caveats: it’s a small study of motivated volunteers over three weeks, and we don’t know how well the change lasts. But it’s a randomized trial with objective measurements, and the methods are things anyone can try at home.

How to shift your schedule earlier

Here’s what the people in the trial were asked to do, with a little context on each.4

  1. Wake up 2 to 3 hours earlier than usual, and go to bed 2 to 3 hours earlier too. Moving bedtime is the point: getting up early without going to bed earlier just means less sleep.
  2. Keep the same times on weekends, within about 15 to 30 minutes. More on why below.
  3. Get as much outdoor light as you can in the morning. A walk, a coffee outside, breakfast by a window. Morning light is one of the main signals that moves your body clock earlier.
  4. Keep the evenings dim. Lower the lights and screens in the last hours before bed.
  5. Eat at regular times. Breakfast soon after waking, lunch at the same time every day, and no dinner after 7 p.m.
  6. No caffeine after 3 p.m.
  7. No naps after 4 p.m.
  8. If you exercise, do it in the morning.

Jumping two hours at once is what the trial tested, and it worked for those volunteers. If that sounds brutal, moving your alarm and bedtime earlier in smaller steps is a gentler way to get there. That isn’t what the trial measured, but the rest of the plan stays the same.

Why weekends undo your progress

Most night owls who try to get up early manage the weekdays and then lose it on Saturday.

Researchers call the gap between your workday and free-day schedules social jetlag: it’s like flying a couple of time zones west every Friday and back every Monday. Late chronotypes have the biggest gaps, building up sleep debt during the week and catching up at the weekend.5

Light can work fast. In one study, a single weekend camping with only natural light moved people’s body clocks earlier by about 69% as much as a whole week of camping did.6 The flip side is that a weekend of late nights, bright screens and long lie-ins pulls in the opposite direction. That’s why the trial asked people to keep their weekend times within half an hour of their weekday ones.

If you want to sleep in, keep it short, and get outside in the morning when you do get up.

What to expect in the first weeks

The first mornings are usually the worst. Waking up while your body clock still thinks it’s night makes the groggy spell after waking, sleep inertia, stronger.7 That’s exactly what you’re doing at the start of a shift like this.

It should ease as your clock catches up: in the trial, it took three weeks of consistency to see the full effect. So don’t judge it after two days, and don’t judge it on a Monday after a late weekend. If it’s also the time of year when mornings are dark, the light advice matters even more; we covered that in Why it’s harder to wake up on dark winter mornings.

When it’s more than being a night owl

Many people can shift their schedule with the steps above. But if you consistently can’t fall asleep until very late however hard you try, or your sleep timing is causing real problems at work, school or home, it’s worth talking to a doctor. Some people’s body clocks run late enough that they need more specific help, and that’s a conversation for a professional, not an alarm app.

How Jera fits in

Jera can’t move your body clock, but it can make the routine above easier to stick to. A repeating alarm at the same time every day, weekends included, does the job of step 2 for you. Moving it earlier in small steps is a quick change in the app. And on those first early mornings, when your body still thinks it’s night, an alarm that builds up over several minutes is a kinder start than one that goes off at full blast.

Jera is designed to support a gentler wake-up. It isn’t a medical device, and if you regularly struggle to wake up or feel unrested, it’s worth talking to a doctor.

Frequently asked questions

Can a night owl become a morning person?

You can shift your schedule substantially earlier. In a three-week trial, night owls who woke and slept 2 to 3 hours earlier, got morning light and kept a consistent schedule moved their sleep about two hours earlier without losing sleep. Whether you become a true morning person depends partly on your genes and age.

How long does it take to reset your body clock?

In that trial, the full shift took three weeks of consistent effort. Light works quickly, though: in one study, a single weekend of natural light moved people’s body clocks noticeably earlier.

Why can’t I fall asleep early even when I’m tired?

If your body clock runs late, your biological night starts late too, so going to bed early can mean lying awake. Morning daylight and dim evenings help move it earlier over time.

Should I sleep in on weekends?

Keep it short. Big differences between weekday and weekend schedules, known as social jetlag, pull your body clock back later and make Monday harder. The trial asked people to keep weekend times within about half an hour of weekdays.

Footnotes

  1. Jones SE, Lane JM, Wood AR, et al. Genome-wide association analyses of chronotype in 697,828 individuals provides insights into circadian rhythms. Nature Communications. 2019;10(1):343. doi:10.1038/s41467-018-08259-7 ↩

  2. Roenneberg T, Kuehnle T, Pramstaller PP, et al. A marker for the end of adolescence. Current Biology. 2004;14(24):R1038–R1039. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2004.11.039 ↩

  3. Wright KP, McHill AW, Birks BR, et al. Entrainment of the human circadian clock to the natural light-dark cycle. Current Biology. 2013;23(16):1554–1558. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.06.039 ↩

  4. Facer-Childs ER, Middleton B, Skene DJ, Bagshaw AP. Resetting the late timing of “night owls” has a positive impact on mental health and performance. Sleep Medicine. 2019;60:236–247. doi:10.1016/j.sleep.2019.05.001 ↩ ↩2

  5. Wittmann M, Dinich J, Merrow M, Roenneberg T. Social jetlag: misalignment of biological and social time. Chronobiology International. 2006;23(1–2):497–509. doi:10.1080/07420520500545979 ↩

  6. Stothard ER, McHill AW, Depner CM, et al. Circadian entrainment to the natural light-dark cycle across seasons and the weekend. Current Biology. 2017;27(4):508–513. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2016.12.041 ↩

  7. Trotti LM. Waking up is the hardest thing I do all day: sleep inertia and sleep drunkenness. Sleep Medicine Reviews. 2017;35:76–84. doi:10.1016/j.smrv.2016.08.005 ↩

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