If you've ever been woken by a paw on your eyelid before sunrise, you already know the routine. You get up. You feed the cat. The cat stops. Everyone goes back to sleep, and tomorrow it happens again, maybe ten minutes earlier.
Most advice online tells you the cat is hungry. That's usually not it.
It's a habit you built together
Cats are crepuscular — most active around dawn and dusk. That part is wiring, and you're not going to train it out. But the waking you specifically part is learned, and you taught it.
Here's the mechanism, and it's worth understanding because it explains why half the fixes fail. The first few times your cat woke you, you probably ignored it. Then one morning you gave in and put food down. From the cat's side, that's a slot machine: most attempts pay nothing, but sometimes one pays out. Intermittent rewards produce the most stubborn behaviour there is — it's the same reason people keep pulling the lever.
Shouting doesn't help either. To a cat that wants your attention, attention is attention.
Separate waking up from being fed
The fix isn't feeding the cat less. It's making sure your getting out of bed has nothing to do with food arriving.
That's hard to do by hand, because you are the thing that produces food. This is where a timed feeder does something you can't do yourself: it puts a portion down at 5 a.m. while you stay in bed and do nothing. Within a couple of weeks the cat learns the food comes from the machine, on a schedule, and you stop being part of the equation.
Set it earlier than the cat currently wakes you — if she's on you at 5:15, set it for 5:00. Once the habit of waking you has faded, you can walk the time later in ten-minute steps over a few weeks.
Two things nobody warns you about
First: it gets worse before it gets better. When a behaviour that used to pay stops paying, animals escalate before they give up. Expect a rough week where she's louder and more insistent. If you cave on day four, you've just taught her that four days of shouting works, and you're worse off than before.
Second: run the feeder for two or three days while you're at home before you rely on it. Watch it dispense. Check the portion. Make sure your cat isn't the type to work the lid open — some are — and keep the batteries in so a power cut doesn't skip breakfast.
[YOUR STORY: how this went in your flat — how long it took, what went wrong, whether one of yours figured out the machine. A paragraph of something that actually happened is the most valuable part of this article.]
When it isn't behaviour
Worth saying plainly: if the early waking is new, especially in an older cat, and it comes with more vocalising, weight loss or a sudden jump in appetite or thirst, that's a vet conversation rather than a training one. Several common conditions in older cats show up exactly like this. A behavioural fix applied to a medical problem just delays treatment.