Even if rising with the sun is not your current modus vivendi, you can still train yourself to make it so – despite believing you’re not a morning person. Here’s how.
Before you actually start waking earlier, you need to work a couple of things:
What’s your ideal morning, and how much time it will take?
What do you wish to do in the mornings? Do you need some ‘me time’ before you start your day? Would your ideal morning routine include doing for a walk, meditating, writing or reading with a cup of coffee? Imagine your perfect morning in fine detail, then realistically estimate how much time you will need to enjoy such a morning. Based on this information, you can then work out what time you will need to wake up. If that makes it too early for you, you can always reimagine your ideal morning – i.e. what you’re willing to compromise.
Know how many hours of sleep you need
Now that you know how much time you’ll need for your ideal morning, you can work out what time you need to go to bed. To do that you will need to know the number of hours of sleep you need in order to wake up feeling refreshed in the morning. Not all of us need eight hours of sleep. Some can get by with six or seven and some of us need nine. Once you know this, as well as your ideal rising time, you can calculate your ideal bedtime.
How to actually get up earlier
Whether you’ve worked out that you need to wake up 30 minutes or three hours earlier to enjoy your ideal morning, here are some tactics to employ to become an early riser:
Change your morning mindset
If you believe you’re not a morning person, constantly refer to ‘Mondayitis’ and are not willing to make some changes, then, of course, you will have no hope of ever waking up earlier. So, instead, why not imagine the ideal morning that you desire? It will help you to get excited about becoming a morning person.
Use the gradual or experimental method
Depending on your personality, you can take the gradual route – where you incrementally wake up 15 minutes earlier each week until you reach your ideal rising time. Or you can take the experimental road – where you trick your mind when you wake up at your ideal time by saying that it’s an experiment and you can quit whenever you want to (but you just keep on going – that’s the trick).
Of course, the gradual route will take longer, but you have to know yourself well enough to know which method will work for you.
Train yourself to wake up at the same time each day
If possible, keep your ideal rising time the same each day. Once you’ve woken up at the same time for a few weeks, it will become automatic, even if you go to bed late. So stop chopping and changing your wake up time. If you haven’t had enough sleep due to the occasional deviation from your ideal bedtime, you can always make up for it with a nap.
Keep the alarm on the other side of the room
As you begin to train yourself to get up earlier, it helps to keep away your alarm (and its snooze button!) from arms’ reach. Better yet, keep it in another room if possible, but not too far away, so that you can still hear it.
What other tricks and tips have you found helpful to make you an early morning person?
