Any suggestions for WBTB?
Hey DragonMaster21! I'm sorry to hear that your WBTB didn't go quite like you'd hoped, but I'm glad that you put in a great effort on it. I winced at the part where your cat woke you up at the wrong time. That sort of thing can be rough and do tend to throw things off a bit.

As you alluded to, I do think that WBTB is best when done naturally, although I totally understand why this just isn't possible for everyone. I tend to have a brief natural awakening after 4-6 hours of sleep, and if I'm not too tired, I'll try to use this as a WBTB.

There are a few things that you can do to make a natural awakening more likely. One is to drink some water, apple juice, or whatever you like shortly before bed. This will tend to help you wake up.

In addition, you can cultivate the habit of naturally waking by resolving to be aware during your own natural wakings and get out of bed. I relied on drinking pre-bed "pee water" for a while until I just got used to waking up around that same time, however briefly. Now, any night that I get enough sleep I tend to wake up around that time and have the choice to pursue WBTB. If I skip this natural waking, it usually means that I was simply too tired to notice it and needed the sleep anyway. We don't want to burn ourselves out!

So my best advice would first try to go to bed thinking that you will wake up at a particular time. If you got to bed at 9:45, say that you will try to wake up at 3:00. Your body may surprise you by complying! Secondarily, experiment with drinking some water or other drink before bed. Finally, if you can look into other alarm methods such as some kind of buzzer (Xanous uses his phone in airplane mode for this), you might find that this is more gentle. I have less experience with using alarms for WBTB. In my case, I simply realized that I was waking up, but simply rolling over, going back to sleep, and forgetting that it ever happened.