If you’re waking up at 3 AM, it’s not a sleep problem. It’s a dopamine problem. Here’s how to fix it

Added: 2026-04-29

[00:00:00]I hacked the 3:00 a.m. wake up. And here's how I did it. Um, I'm talking about this right now specifically because we're dropping a track in the library. You can go get that. But here's what happened. Um, I don't know if you know this, but 25 to 27% of all humans have a sleep disorder. Not those of us who just wake up with busy minds, but a sleep disorder. And the most common wake up time is in that 2 to 3:00 a.m. And there's some science behind that. And here's why. Your cortisol uh levels naturally start to raise between 2 and 3:00 a.m. And they do that, your adrenals, you know, release cortisol to prepare you for the day. So when you get up, you can manage stress and all the things you got to do. That's just normal. But because your circadian rhythm, cortisol naturally starts to increase. And if you're not in a deep sleep or you don't have that that habit, then it's possible you're going to wake up. And then you make a decision or we make a decision that forms a habit and that habit releases dopamine and that dopamine gives us some kind of a feel-good. And then we this habit turns into a massive neuropathway in our brain that becomes a super highway and we can't break the habit. So here's how I hacked it. I found two different studies. One was from 2013, one was from 2017. I think this was in 2019 when I figured this out. And the two studies are this. You know, there's a part of your brain called um in school we we learned about it as the bane basil ganglia. I call the basil nuclei. It's a group of nuclei in the brain. If do you know how this center lower section of your brain that's right by the stem looks like the eye of Horus? If you don't, you should study that because they absolutely knew what the deal was in ancient Egypt. So, here's the thing.

[00:01:26]in the the middle the round part of that the eye is really what's called the ba basil gangli basil nuclei this group of nuclei and here's what it really is it's like the traffic control center for your brain all the other parts of your brain have some kind of input they send it through that basil nuclei basil nuclei is like a traffic control center and it says go or no go this is a simplification but it's like a direct or indirect pathway it either creates movement or it inhibits movement that's what it does so consider a green light or a red light and then it makes those decisions what it wants you to do or what you're going to do based on what its previous rewards have been. So, if you have a habit at 3:00 a.m. of waking up and having a dopamine hit, like hitting social media or reading an email or seeing your screen or doom scrolling or whatever, that's a dopamine hit and you're going to stay awake and you're going to build a habit. On the other hand, what I did, and it took I thought it was going to take 21 days. It didn't.

[00:02:14]It took like three is I hacked a piece of music and I found another study in 2017 that allowed me to get the hertz down into like 0.5 to one hertz and use a specific type of spiked pink noise that would activate that part of your brain and it literally shifted everything. I think within 3 maybe 2 days it was done. It was shifted and now anytime I wake up at that time I put that on and I put into some other tracks so it goes to sleep. But you can do the same thing by just building different habits when you wake up. Don't give yourself a dopamine hit. Okay.