Waking up earlier and sleep medication

I'd stay away from sleep meds... if you have any kind of sleep issues the first thing to do is to cut all caffeine... it takes about a week to get it out of your system...
I like sleeping rather short ~5-6 hours and taking 2 20 min power naps in the day... I work from home so that's easy... as far as training yourself to fall asleep I'd look into self hypnosis... it's not that different from meditation... you basically use your imagination to focus on your mind on nothing

 

Actually there is more:

In order to find your best sleep pattern and be able to control your sleep within it I had to do a few things:

1) Make sure you are tired before you go to bed. Things like exercise, cold showers, or some relaxing activity before bed, either to calm you down, or keep you awake long enough till it is bed time so you don't get too much sleep
2) Always wake up with an alarm. Initially that is rough but if you have 2 power naps planned it's not going to be too bad. (and never use caffeine or only a fixed limited amount, to get you going)
3) Also set the alarm for the powernap. I had to experiment takes me about 5 min to fall asleep, if I sleep more than 15 min I wake up groggy. So I set a timer for 20 min. I have a friend who only sleeps 5.

In general it is better to sleep a bit too little than too much. If you sleep to little you will sleep deeper and the powernaps will be easy. If you sleep too much or are way off your schedule it will take more discipline to recover.

Also the goal is not to achieve some arbitrary sleep time but the best amount so you can sleep deeply and have maximum amount of energy. Once I had this pattern going it became naturaul and I could just relax it.

 

Sleep medications lower the quality of your sleep, and many of them (ambien, benzodiazepines) etc are very addictive.

What you need to do is adjust your sleep schedule. If you need to wake up at 5AM every day (or find yourself waking up at that time every day) then you need to start getting to bed earlier. ~9PM or so, so that you ensure you get 7-8 hours sleep.

If you struggle to fall asleep earlier, then you have 3 major solutions:

Option 1) Go to bed SUPER early, like 5-6PM, and just lay in bed until you fall asleep even if it takes hours. This might not work for everyone, but it's a way to fix your sleep pattern without adding in any additional sleep deprivation.

Option 2) If you can't go to sleep earlier, then try skipping one night of sleep. Rather than going to bed at 2AM or whenever it is you sleep, simply don't go to bed, the next night, try to go to bed at 7-8PM (1-2 hours before your ideal sleep time). It should work since you're extra tired, and you should be able to now make that your new sleep pattern, but if it doesn't, there's a third option...

Option 3) If you really can't get to sleep any earlier, then try the opposite. This won't work if you have work/school, and don't work from home, so if you can't get a few free days then you'll need to just keep trying Options 1 and 2 until you succeed. If you can take a week off or so, this method works great for people who have trouble adjusting their sleep patterns. Basically, take the current time you fall asleep, and go to bed 3 hours later tonight (i.e. if you normally go at 2AM, go to bed at 5AM), then +3 the next night, and so on, all the way until you reach a normal sleep pattern. (i.e. 2AM -> 5AM -> 8AM -> 11AM -> 2PM -> 5PM -> 8PM - it should take a week~)