We have all heard that we are more productive when we wake up early in the morning and attack the day. Although this might be said mostly by morning people, as many night people will also make the argument that they get more work done at night while it’s quiet. We may have a reason to try and change teams and become a morning person. Most night people, when they first try this, failed miserably. It’s too hard, and waking up early in the morning is a nightmare. You’re groggy, you can’t think, and the only desire in your life is to crawl back into bed and sleep more. You curse at those morning people, that leap out of bed happy and get their day started. Well, you can’t just turn a switch and turn yourself into a morning person. However, it is possible to change. Here are a few ways that can get you that change and help you join the team of morning people. You can see what it’s like to live on the other side and if you like it you can always stay there.
Go to bed earlier
Although this might seem the most obvious thing in the world, it’s also one of the hardest. When you’re first starting to try and change into a morning person, when night rolls around you’re just not tired. If you’re used to staying up till 2am in the morning, certainly going to bed at 8 pm or 9 pm seems absolutely ridiculous. You lay there in bed for hours thinking what the hell are you doing. Well just like anything, don’t jump in with two feet. Become serious about what time you get in bed though. If you’re used to going to bed at 2 am for a week, start going go to bed at 1 am, and then for another week go to bed at midnight. Your body will adjust. You will find that as you go to bed earlier, you’ll start to get tired a little earlier, and you’ll start waking up a little earlier naturally. Eventually, if you keep pushing at it and stay disciplined, you’ll find that you can get up as the sun rises, and you can feel like a million dollars getting up and accomplishing your goal of becoming a morning person. But the key is you need to get sleep earlier.
Get rid of the alarm
Okay, you’re asking yourself if we are insane. You have to have that alarm to get up because otherwise you’ll miss out on your day, be late to work, etc. Well if you section one, and get to bed early, then you will find you will wake up well in advance of when you need to wake up before. So you don’t need the alarm. Alarms have been added fairly recently in our lives and we consider them to be one of the more evil contraptions of our technology. Going back a hundred years or more you didn’t find alarms that common. People just went to bed early enough to get enough sleep. A side note of not having an alarm, is that you will wake up more easily as you will be wondering what time it is. With an alarm it doesn’t just wake you up, it also sedates you to the fact that you don’t have to wake up until you hear that alarm. So you don’t wake up naturally. You think “oh great, my alarm has not gone off yet, I can still sleep.” So get rid of the alarm, and you’ll find yourself waking up early and see what time it is.
Don’t give up
It takes time for habits to change. So give it enough time for your body to accept the habit. Many people say 30 days, 60 days, or whatever to establish a new habit. The reality is habits are established after you’ve done it long enough to establish it. As nebulous as that seems, that’s the way it is. Just keep doing it long enough, and eventually, your body will figure out that is where it should be. Then if you start to stay up late, your body will complain, because it’s used to the new habit of getting up early and going to bed early. Stick to it.
Get rid of the Tech
One of the problems with getting to sleep early, and definitely something for people that stay up late and work on computers, is the fact that your screens, whether your phone, TV, or laptop, emit blue light, which is your body’s way of knowing that it’s supposed to be awake. You can get programs that you can put on your laptop and phone, that at a certain hour of nighttime will remove a lot of the screens blue light. But best if you can just not watch TV, play with your phone, or play on the internet, for a few hours before you go to sleep. Staring at a white bright light is also another way of your body to know it’s daytime and should be awake. Do other things.
Don’t forget the weekends
When you start your new schedule for going to bed early and getting up early, remember the weekends. The weekends are not an excuse to suddenly stay up till 2 am again. You can do it occasionally, but you will feel the pain of trying to get up early once you do. Once your body has created the habit, it will be hard to break that habit. So on the weekends, those late nights need to be removed as well. So do your socializing earlier and if you think to yourself, that you’re going to lose all your friends and “oh my God nobody else goes to bed earlier,” you are wrong. if you really look around, you will find a lot of people that disappear in the earlier hours as they’re going to home to bed because they have to get up early. Become one of those people.
8 hours
Try at least 8 hours of sleep. Okay, yeah we hear you, you’re one of those special people that only needs to sleep four hours, or 6 hours a night. You are not one of those people. You just do that because you have to and you think you can. Sleep deprivation is a real thing, it interferes with your performance and your mental ability to judge. You may think you’re doing well on 5 hours sleep a night, but you will do so much better on 8 hours a night. If you get that 8 hours, you will find it’s all so much easier to get out of bed in the morning.
Window of opportunity
Another thing you need to look for is those moments when you wake up that you are wide awake. We call these windows of opportunity. You may not recognize them for what they are, but for people that have a hard time getting up in the morning, these are miracles. I’m sure you’ve all felt it, that one time when you woke up, and you felt completely awake and happy. But what did you do? You thought “great”, and you then rolled over and tried to go back to sleep again. When you get these opportunities, get up. We have lost count of how many times we have heard people say, “I woke up and I could have got up.” So if you wake up and you recognize that you’re awake, don’t fall back in the habit of laying back down, get up while you can, get up while it’s not painful. Once you start recognizing these windows of opportunity and using them, you’ll suddenly find your whole life changed. You’ll be getting up and being one of those cheerful people that wake up in the morning and get out of bed without struggling.
It really Isn’t that hard to become a morning person. It’s more a choice of what you want to be. If you don’t have any reason to become a morning person, just telling yourself you’re going to be one isn’t going to cut it. You’re going to stay a night person. Decide what you want to be a morning person for, and plan it out like a campaign. Don’t get discouraged, if you lay awake at night,eventually your body will adjust. If you really have to, you can always get up after you’ve gone to bed, and do some work, or read a book. Whatever you do, don’t get on the computer, or do anything else that you like to do for entertainment. You’re not here to reward yourself for waking up. If you can’t sleep and it’s 2 am, get up and do the laundry. With that thought, we’ll bet most of you won’t get up and just stick it out until you sleep. Being a morning person can be an amazing thing, you can get almost all of your day done before the time at which you used to get up, you will feel like you have so much more time in the day and be much more relaxed. So make your decision, and give it a try, here comes the sun.
