The expectation is that having a baby wrecks your sleep, and you feel exhausted and sleep-deprived for 18 years until they fly the coop for college. But I’d argue that having a baby was actually the best thing to ever happen to my sleep.

Why? Because my baby, with her healthy brain and intact circadian rhythm, wakes up at 6:45 a.m. like clockwork. And there’s no snooze button on a baby (believe me, I’ve searched high and low). Her adorable cries have forced a rigid sleep schedule on the whole household in a way that no alarm clock ever could have. And it has been amazing.

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So here’s how to sleep like a person with a baby, whether you have one or not:

Step 1: Assume your wake-up time is not long after sunrise. Aim for something in the range of 6 to 7 a.m.

Step 2: Accept that this wake-up time is seven days a week, nonnegotiable, and as certain as death and taxes. Live by this. If you have kids, they’ll take care of this for you. If you don’t, it’s the honor system. This is a relationship between you and your alarm clock. With each snooze, you’re only cheating yourself.

Step 3: You need to get in bed early enough that you get enough sleep, even though the alarm is going off at the crack of dawn. If you need eight hours of sleep, then count back about eight and a half hours from your wake-up time, and that’s when you need to be in bed.

Overtired happens when you don’t fall asleep when you’re tired, and the body releases cortisol, a stress hormone, to meet the demands of staying awake. This results in wakefulness and sometimes a stress response. Overtired babies are irritable, and it paradoxically gets harder rather than easier to get them to sleep. It slowly dawned on me that adults suffer from the same issue. When babies get overtired, they’re irritable and they cry. For adults, it can manifest as feeling tired but wired, a state of mind in which we can’t shut off our minds just as we’re trying to fall asleep.

The fact is, there’s a window of time when you’re sleepy. For most of us, that’s about three hours after sunset, or somewhere in the range of 9 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. in our local time zones. If we push through and stay up past that window, whether it’s because we need to finish work, check off a few more boxes on the to-do list, or we get sucked into one more episode on Netflix, our body thinks: Oh! We’re not going to sleep even though we’re tired; there must be a good reason: We must be at war or on the great transcontinental migration. In an effort to help us meet the demands of whatever may be keeping us up, the body releases cortisol, which gives us a jolt of energy, wakefulness, and stress. Thousands of years ago, this response was helpful for survival. But today is a different story. For us, this can feel like anxiety, panic, agitated wakefulness, or racing thoughts, even though we’re exhausted. With cortisol coursing through the veins, we attempt to crawl into bed at midnight, or 1 a.m., and, big surprise, we can’t sleep.

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