I was on a guys’ trip recently in Miami with a bunch of my college buddies. Like most trips with a big group, we had to split up two to a room. I ended up with my friend Eric the first night. I fell asleep quickly, which is usually the easy part for me.
The problem started a few hours later.
I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of Eric snoring. Not normal snoring. This was the kind of snoring where there were long pauses followed by gasping for air, like a lawn mower trying to start. At first I thought maybe I was half asleep and imagining it, but the longer I lay there the more obvious it became that something wasn’t right. My friend genuinely sounded like he was fighting for oxygen.
Now I’m lying there wide awake with a dilemma. I can’t go back to sleep because if I throw on noise-canceling headphones and ignore it and he actually chokes to death in the middle of the night, I’m basically responsible. At the same time, waking a grown man up to tell him he sounds like he’s dying in his sleep isn’t exactly a smooth move either. So I stayed awake for most of the night listening to this and hoping he would make it until morning.
When he finally woke up, I was already in the kitchen pounding coffee because I hadn’t slept at all.
He walked in like it was a normal morning and I looked at him and said, “Bro, what in the fuck of all fucks was that last night? I honestly don’t know how you’re alive. It sounds like your brain and body are starving for oxygen. I don’t know how you stay married. Do you even sleep in the same bedroom? Have you ever had this checked?”
We were laughing hysterically, but the truth is it wasn’t really funny.
Eric shrugged and said his wife had been telling him the same thing for years. He knew he should probably get it checked out, but like most of us he just hadn’t gotten around to doing anything about it. I told him he needed to handle it immediately and that there was absolutely no chance we were sharing a room again that weekend unless one of us slept on the couch.
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My Reality Check
When I got home and told my wife Kate the story, she listened (im)patiently and then hit me with…
“You know you snore and gasp too. Maybe not as bad as that, but it’s definitely something I’ve noticed.”
That got my attention.
Because even though I’ve been waking up around three in the morning for months, I never really thought there was a problem.
My routine had become pretty predictable. I’d wake up, go to the bathroom, and then lie there staring at the ceiling while my brain started firing on all cylinders. Thoughts about work, ideas for writing, random worries, and plans for the next day would start running through my head. Eventually I would grab my phone and start typing notes until I drifted back to sleep with it resting on my chest.
Technically I was still getting seven or eight hours of sleep most nights.
But if I was being honest with myself, it wasn’t good sleep.
I had just chalked it up to normal guy with a lot of shit on his mind stuff.
Spending an entire night listening to your friend sound like he’s about to die in his sleep, followed by your wife telling you that you’re not exactly far behind him, has a way of changing your perspective.
So I decided to do a sleep test. It’s a simple at-home setup where you wear a small device on your finger overnight and the data gets sent in through an app for analysis.
The results showed significant sleep apnea.
From there I went to see a local sleep specialist. Both of the doctors I spoke with are men I know and trust and have interviewed before. Dr. Michael Breus runs the online Sleep Doctor program, and Dr. Raza Pasha is here in Houston. I’m still a little old school when it comes to this kind of thing and prefer seeing someone face to face if I can.
The sleep doctor initially suggested a CPAP machine, which I was hesitant about. Dr. Pasha recommended trying a custom mouth guard first, so I decided to go that route.
Around the same time, I convinced Eric to get checked out as well. No surprise there, he also has sleep apnea. He ended up making the same decision and got a custom mouth guard too. Now we’re both wearing them, and the difference has been remarkable.
It has genuinely been (mid)life changing.
Why We All Wake Up at 3AM
The more I started learning about this, the more obvious it became that Eric and I are not unusual cases. We’re actually pretty typical examples of what happens to a lot of men in midlife. Which got me thinking about how many of us wake up in the middle of the night and struggle to fall back asleep without having any idea why, and how many simply accept it as part of getting older.
Around that same time I saw a post from my friend Dr. Hal Mohammed, the Chief Medical Officer for Gameday Men’s Health. Hal is the real deal. In fact, he admitted that he wrote the post at 4:42 in the morning because he couldn’t sleep himself. I appreciated the honesty, so I called him.
Dr. Hal explained that it is rarely just one thing causing these early morning wake-ups. The pattern of waking between three and five in the morning and struggling to return to sleep is something called sleep maintenance insomnia, and in middle-aged men it is usually the result of several factors working together.
Quiet Sleep Killers
Cortisol naturally begins to rise around that time of night as the body prepares to wake up. In men dealing with chronic stress from work, finances, family responsibilities, or leadership roles, that rise can be exaggerated. The body feels tired, but the brain suddenly switches on. Racing thoughts about responsibilities and problems to solve make it difficult to fall back asleep.
That part sounded very familiar to me.
Many men also carry a heavy cognitive load quietly. Even without obvious anxiety, the middle of the night is when the mind starts sorting through everything you’re responsible for. At three or four in the morning there are no distractions, which means the thoughts that normally stay in the background suddenly get a lot louder.
Hormones play a role as well. Testosterone peaks during sleep and gradually declines as men age. Lower levels are associated with fragmented sleep, reduced deep sleep, and earlier waking. Men in their late thirties through their fifties often start noticing this shift.
Alcohol can also contribute. Even though it has been a while since I’ve had a drink, I remember the nights when it felt easy to fall asleep only to wake up wide awake in the middle of the night. Alcohol suppresses REM sleep early on and then causes a rebound effect later as the body metabolizes it.
Add in sleep apnea, weight gain, blood sugar fluctuations from late-night meals, and the fact that many fathers subconsciously sleep lighter because they feel responsible for everything happening around them, and it becomes pretty clear why so many men struggle with sleep.
This is very real for men in midlife.
We joke about snoring. We normalize broken sleep. We move to separate bedrooms and call it practical. But chronic sleep fragmentation affects testosterone, mood, cardiovascular health, cognitive sharpness, patience with your wife, and presence with your kids.
It’s not dramatic and it’s not weakness. It’s simply common, and the good news is that it is manageable.
Getting ahead of it by collecting data, talking to a doctor, adjusting habits, or treating sleep apnea if it’s there isn’t about being fragile. It’s about being responsible. Most of us do not act until we see proof, and in my case it took hearing my friend gasping for air all night, my wife telling me that I wasn’t much different, and finally seeing the data from a sleep test.
Before all of that, I thought I was just a high-performing guy who woke up at three in the morning and that was simply how my life worked.
It turns out I was just a guy who needed to pay attention.
And now that I have, I feel noticeably better.
That may sound like a small thing, but anyone who has struggled with sleep knows that it really isn’t.
In Health,
Greg Scheinman
Founder, Midlife Male
Husband. Father. Entrepreneur. Coach.
