I'm going to treat this answer as if you're suffering from insomnia. True insomnia may or may not be your problem, that's up for you and possibly your doctors t

I'm going to treat this answer as if you're suffering from insomnia. True insomnia may or may not be your problem, that's up for you and possibly your doctors to figure out. The basics for treating insomnia: - exercise regularly - eat healthily - get enough sunlight at the right time of day. If you're waking up too early then you want more sunlight in the afternoon and evening. - practice good sleep hygiene. This means you only use your bedroom for two activities: sleep and sex. If you lie in bed for more than fifteen minutes without falling to sleep or wake up early and can't get back to sleep, get up and go somewhere else until you are sleepy again. Don't lie in bed trying to sleep. The brain becomes acclimatized to being awake in bed, and that's bad. Now, the medication-based approaches: - consult with a neurologist if the above approaches don't help. - Personally I found a low-dose anti-anxiety medication to be extremely helpful. Many of these cause dependence and can be hard to get off of, but on the other hand chronic lack of sleep has significant medical risks of its own, so I felt the tradeoff was a good one. - prescription sleep medications can also be helpful, although somewhat less so for someone who wakes up too early as opposed to someone who has difficulty falling asleep. If you go this route, you probably want to try Sonata, which has a short half life versus, say, Ambient and therefore leaves you feeling less drugged after three or four hours. - I also found Rozerem to be very helpful. Unlike all other sleep medications, Rozerem is a melatonin receptor agonist. It does not sedate you; it reinforces your circadian rhythms. It does not leave me feeling drugged and does not affect my sleep architecture. Now, the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy approach: - you can train your brain to associate "bed" with "sleep". It ain't easy, but for many people it works and doesn't require medication. - figure out how long you're sleeping on average. - for a week, do not go to bed at all until one full hour less than your average sleep duration. In other words, if you sleep six hours a night and wake up at 7, don't go to bed until 2 AM. Keep this up for a week. The idea is to intentionally build up a sleep deficit, so your body will go to sleep quickly and stay asleep. Continue to religiously wake up and get out of bed at 7. - the next week give yourself an extra fifteen minutes of sleep. Go to bed at 1:45 AM, or get up at 7:15. - keep this up until you are getting the amount of sleep you need. - If at any time you find yourself not going to sleep immediately or waking up too early, back up fifteen minutes. - By the end of the process you hopefully have retrained your brain to associate being in bed with being asleep. I personally found consulting with a neurologist and figuring an approach that worked for me to be very helpful.