I fall asleep fine but wake at 3am and can't get back down. Why?

Waking at a fixed hour is one of the few sleep patterns the classical record takes seriously, with a specific way of checking it.

Middle-of-the-night waking is the most common insomnia complaint and it has several distinct drivers. Alcohol fragments sleep in the second half of the night, so a drink at 8pm surfaces at 3am. Blood sugar dips if dinner was high-carb and early. Stress keeps the brain in light sleep, so normal arousals become wakefulness you remember. Sleep apnoea wakes you to breathe. And if you go to bed at 9pm, 3am may simply be a full sleep quota. The behavioural fix with the best evidence is counterintuitive: if you are awake and frustrated after roughly twenty minutes, get up, keep the lights dim, do something boring, and return when sleepy - because lying there rehearsing worry teaches the bed to mean wakefulness. Check caffeine timing and alcohol first, and mention snoring to a clinician. Chinese medicine assigns 1-3am to the liver and 3-5am to the lungs, reading recurring waking in those windows as liver blood or qi not settling - which, in practice, mostly points at the same inputs: stress load, alcohol, late screens and sleep regularity.

Qicura reads a described symptom against this kind of material and returns a pattern in plain language with the sources named. It does not dispense: no herb quantities, no formula composition, no preparation instructions, and no needling technique - those are deliberate limits enforced on the server, not wording we soften for a page.

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