I keep waking up at 4am. Is it stress, or something else?

Charlotte Cripps, The Independent

Why do I randomly wake up at the same time each night? It’s always 4am on the dot. I’m starting to wonder if it has some special significance – beyond sheer annoyance. I’ve tried eyemasks. Relaxation techniques. Electrolyte sachets with added magnesium. Nothing works. Every night: 4am. A 2021 study titled The Different Faces of Insomnia found that 40 per cent of us experience early morning waking, and have trouble falling back to sleep again. The typical reasons trotted out often include the insomnia, stress, ageing, medications, diet, and pain. But, lying awake in the quiet of the night researching my problem, I come across another, altogether more exotic explanation: the spirit world.

According to folklore, the “witching hour”, variably said to be between midnight and 4am, is when the veil between the living and the spirit world is believed to be paper-thin, making communication with spirits easier; waking up signals that you are spiritually in tune. It may, if you believe such things, indicate astral travel — the soul returning to the body after traversing other universes.

My penchant for 4am rousings might mean that spirit guides are sending important messages, or guiding me towards my destiny. In desperation, I decided to look into the woo-woo rationale behind these claims, as well as the more scientific explanations, in the hope I might find a solution. If that means accepting that a guardian angel is trying to alert me to important news, or that my racing mind is egged on by an overactive third eye chakra, then so be it.

I don’t want to knock myself out with sleeping pills — or scroll the news headlines on my phone at dawn. A-list acupuncturist Ross Barr, who runs sessions out of Claridge’s Spa, has a client list that includes Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, both of whom had regular appointments with him as part of their pre-wedding wellness routine. Repeatedly waking at a particular time, Barr tells me, has huge significance. “It is rarely random. Eastern medicine figured out long ago,” he says. “It’s often a clue pointing to a possible imbalance in a specific organ or an underlying emotional cause.”

According to the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) organ clock, each three-hour window is linked to a different organ system. Waking at 1am to 3am, Barr tells me, is liver time. “It’s often associated with internal heat, frustration, stress, or alcohol,” he says. Waking between 3am and 5am, meanwhile, signals issues with the lungs. “(It’s) more about grief and loss, or typical lung pathology like asthma.” But waking too early before your alarm can also suggest that you’re running on adrenaline, he says. “It’s like your body is bracing for something, as if it’s trying to get ahead of danger or the day itself.”

Others believe that imbalanced chakras — energy centres thought to govern different physical and emotional functions — are the culprit. The third eye, which is related to intuition and sleep regulation, and root chakra, associated with feelings of security and grounding, are often linked with sleep disturbances like insomnia or restless sleep.

“At around 4am, the throat and the heart chakras are functioning at their strongest,” says Padma Coram, a spiritual and integrative lifestyle and wellness expert at London’s Hale Clinic. She claims that if the seven chakras are not flowing freely along the spine, from the base to the crown of the head, the body wakes up to alert you to fix the problem. “It’s not just sleep disturbance — it’s the soul gently tapping or knocking. The body is trying to get your attention through the subconscious.” In my case, she says, waking at 4am repeatedly could mean there’s unspoken emotion, suppressed grief, or a truth that needs to be expressed. She advises facing problems head-on. “We either want to stick our heads under the sand, we get irritable, angry and highly strung, or want to go out to get distracted,” she says, “but it’s important to voice our concerns even if it’s just to ourselves, so that the mind and body can process them.”