Why I Wake Up at 3 A.M. (And Why You Shouldn’t)

Why I Wake Up at 3 A.M. (And Why You Shouldn’t) by Shayla Marie

I wake up at 3 a.m. most every single morning. And before you click away thinking, “Well, good for you, lady,” I need you to hear me say this: for years, waking up early was something I was doing the wrong way. I was doing it in a way that was destroying my health.

Why I Wake Up at 3 A.M. (And Why You Shouldn’t)

Transcript from video

Stick with me, because this is not what you think it is. And I believe it is going to bless you for years to come.

I’m Shayla, a wife of 21 years, a mom of six, a second generation homeschooler, and a homemaker for over 33 years. I have a running business and we have a small family farm that I oversee. And I have something to say about rising early that most people in this space are not going to tell you, because honestly, they probably haven’t lived it the way that I have.

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The Comment That Sent Me Back to This Topic

A couple weeks ago I made a video called The Secret Schedule Hidden in Proverbs 31, and it went very well. It was very popular. But ever since, I have been getting comment after comment from women drowning in guilt because they cannot rise early. Women with newborns. Women in perimenopause, which, hello! I’m there too! Women who are just tired.

And I realized I didn’t go deep enough. I didn’t clarify some things. So I need to do that today.

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What Scripture Actually Says

A lot of us here are Christians, and those of us who aren’t are looking for ways to be more productive. But I am going to refer to scripture here, because it matters.

In Proverbs 31, speaking of the Proverbs 31 woman, the Bible tells us that she rises while it is still yet night. And I believe in that and I live that. Most mornings I wake up before 3 a.m. naturally, before the house wakes, before the needs pile up, before the noise begins. That silence is so anchoring. It’s where my most productive brain energy hours are spent.

When I wake up early, I’m not scrambling to survive. I’m setting the spiritual climate of my home. I’m getting things done that need to be done. I’m working on my business. That quiet time in the morning really does dictate the energy of everything that follows.

But here is what I also need to tell you.

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The Science Behind How You Wake Up

Did you know that how you wake up in the morning affects your entire nervous system for the rest of the day?

A few years ago, I was in cognitive behavior therapy where I found out I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder. And through that process, I learned something that completely changed how I understood mornings.

When you wake up to noise, alarms blaring, kids bickering, cereal spilling, notifications pinging, rushing, your body immediately shifts into what is called sympathetic mode. Fight or flight. Your cortisol spikes, your heart rate rises, your brain scans for threats. And if you start your day there, your nervous system will spend the rest of the day trying to catch up.

And I want to say something about this. If you start your day there and it goes on for a long time, once you hit perimenopause, your body is simply not going to be able to do it anymore.

Now take the opposite. When you wake up a little more slowly, quietly, dim lights, please no overhead lights first thing in the morning, and you wake up to some quiet and a warm drink in your hands with no immediate demands, your parasympathetic nervous system is activated. That is your rest and regulate state. Instead of being thrown into reactivity, you enter the day more anchored and peaceful.

For large family moms, especially homeschool moms who are spending their entire day with their children, this is really important. If your nervous system is dysregulated by 6:30 a.m., you are going to feel overstimulated by 9:00 a.m. But if you can begin in quiet regulation, you can absorb the noise of the day without absorbing the stress.

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The Hard Truth I Learned the Hard Way

For 13 years I was having babies. For 15 of those years I had a nursing baby. Not the same nursing baby, different nursing babies. Most of those years, my babies would wake the moment I slipped out of bed. I got so tired of advice from people who had never lived this, telling me consistently, “You just need to get out of bed and do your devotions.” They didn’t understand. The moment I would get out of bed, I had a baby to take care of, every morning, 15 years straight.

I wanted that quiet morning time so desperately that I started waking at 1 a.m. the majority of many mornings. We were in poverty, not just low income, actual poverty. I was trying to build a part-time business, caring for a baby, and then homeschooling later in the day. Those were hard years and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

By the time I had my sixth baby, something was very wrong.

By the time I turned 40, we had just moved almost 2,000 miles with a newborn. I started rapidly gaining weight over a winter. I was having more fatigue and exhaustion spells, which I had never experienced before. My last baby would only sleep about two hours at a stretch for two years. By the time he was around six months to a year old, my whole body was in pain.

At a doctor’s checkup, she ran some blood work.

Hashimoto’s hypothyroidism.

I had pushed my body too hard, for too many years, for too many seasons. There were other factors too. Toxic relationships our family should have ended sooner. Years of exposure to agricultural sprays in the area where we were living. But I share all of this not to scare you. I share it because I want you to hear me clearly.

Sleep is when your body heals. If you are forcing yourself out of bed in sheer pure exhaustion, and especially if you are in your childbearing years, you could be borrowing against a debt that your body will eventually collect.

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What We Get Wrong About the Proverbs 31 Woman

Here is something very freeing that most people miss in this conversation.

The Proverbs 31 chapter is a picture of a woman’s life over time. She was not doing all of these things in a single day or a single week or a single season. This is her story spread over a lifetime.

So if you are in a season of newborns, night wakings, postpartum recovery, perimenopause, illness, or deep exhaustion, you are not failing the Proverbs 31 standard. You are living inside a different chapter of it.

The Bible even tells us that God gently leads those who are with young (Isaiah 40:11). If God is gentle with us in hard seasons, we need to learn to be gentle with ourselves as well.

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Practical Help for Wherever You Are Right Now

If you have young children, the goal is not long silence. It is nervous system gentleness. Rising early in that season might not mean 5 a.m. And maybe, like me, it means that no matter what time you get up, the kids get up with you. So here is what you can do.

Take mornings slower. Have a little morning basket with toys your young children only play with in the morning, so you can sit back with a cup of tea. Keep mornings gentler. If you do not have to have rigid set times for everything, then don’t feel like you need to make them. Instead, use windows of time for getting the important things done. If you do have set times, build in margin and more breaks.

And accept this truth, because it will free you: there are going to be survival days. Not just in the childbearing years, but for your whole life. If you are up all night with a sick baby, or up half the night with hot flashes, you get up when you get up. You take more breaks. You call it a survival day and you move on. Those days are not failures. They are seasons, and they require a different strategy. They do not require you forcing yourself out of bed before your body is ready.

If you need help learning how to create a peaceful homemaking journey in which you can thrive in, I can help you with this inside my homemaking courses.

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Why I Personally Wake Up at 3 A.M.

Now let me tell you why I personally wake up at 3 a.m.

It is because that is the way God made me.

I have always been a natural early riser, probably since I was around 20, definitely by 25. There is actually something called short sleeper syndrome, and I have wondered if I have a mild case of it. I am not sure, because I do have times where I need more sleep. But when I am healthy, I usually function fairly well on about 5 to 6 hours and cannot sleep past a few hours.

That 3 a.m. rising though, it started with something specific. This was back in 2019. I had been feeling this pull to start what is now Singing a New Song, Mountain Mama’s Home. Ideas kept waking me up in the middle of the night. I had six kids, I was homeschooling, and I had my first business that had come to an end (I didn’t know it at the time, but the Lord was making a way for Singing A New Song).

I was in an okay, what’s next phase. I knew my children and their education were the priority, but I also knew there was something more I was being called to do. You feel it in your bones when that is happening.

One night I woke up at 1 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep, and this had been going on for weeks. I finally prayed. I had all of these thoughts swirling in my mind, things that felt like they needed to be said to younger women struggling through hard seasons I’d struggled through and overcome, and women in similar seasons as mine. So I said, “Lord, if you want me to start this ministry, keep me awake. But if you don’t, please let me be asleep by 2 o’clock.”

I was genuinely neutral. I was okay with either answer.

2 o’clock came. Wide awake. Eyes bright. Not tired, not groggy, just ready.

So I got up and I started doing the work.

That was the beginning of everything you see here.

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The Truth I Had to Learn the Hard Way

Waking early is a gift when your body gives it freely.

It becomes a curse when you force it from a body that is begging you to rest.

Listen to your body. Honor your season. Trust that God’s rhythms for your life are kinder than the productivity culture you have been handed.

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