Waking up in the middle of the night due to an early melatonin pulse and shifted morning cortisol can be offset by going to bed earlier.

“And then you're falling asleep around 10:30, 11:00, and waking up at 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning and you can't fall back asleep, chances are that your melatonin pulse was initiated early in the night. So that melatonin pulse started probably around 8:30 or 9:00, but you're staying up, you're battling that melatonin. And then sometime around 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning, that melatonin is no longer present at sufficiently high levels in your bloodstream and you're waking up, you're getting your morning cortisol pulse shifted into those wee hours of the morning. You may not like this advice, but one of the things that you can do to offset that is to simply go to bed earlier.”