Certain aspects of the present disclosure provide a method for wireless communication by a user equipment (UE). The UE starts a first timer (such as a discontinuous reception (DRX) hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) round-trip-time (RTT) timer), after sending an uplink (UL) data transmission to a network entity. The UE then starts a second timer (such as a DRX retransmission timer) when the first timer expires. The UE then determines whether to wake up or sleep for a duration of the second timer based on a prior block error rate (BLER).