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How do you wake yourself up in the mornings?
I often have a really hard time getting myself to wake up and get out of bed in the mornings in time to go to work or whatever else I need to do. I was hoping people might be willing to share any good strategies they use to get themselves up and going every day.
I can't stand being startled awake. Some people may appreciate the burst of adrenaline and elevated heart rate that come from a sudden blaring sound in their ears, but not me. I'm also not a heavy sleeper, so any more than a minimal alarm is overkill for me; I wake up to this calming electronica song. I live far enough north that the sun is up bright and early in summertime, but winters are a different story. A Philips sunrise lamp has been very helpful with that.
Though I like to ease gently out of sleep, I've found that lingering in bed and dragging things out isn't a good way to begin the day either. I've trained myself to get out of bed immediately. It doesn't make every morning a breeze, but generally just getting on my feet goes a long way toward getting there. The mornings I snooze, I invariably end up feeling sleepier and more difficult than the ones when I get out of bed as soon as I hear the music. I don't have any tricks for making this part easier, but it does come more naturally with practice.
I don't have a programmable coffee maker but I enjoy making iced coffee this time of year. I'll brew it before I go to bed the night before. It's nice to just pull a pitcher out of the fridge and pour a glass as soon as I enter the kitchen.
I think you're absolutely right in your second paragraph. One problem I sometimes have is that I'll be awake, chill in bed before getting up, and then just pass out again. I really need to find a good method to force me to get right up and then make a habit of that.
I've tried a number of things but the only way that really works for me is the most obvious one, getting enough sleep (on a consistent schedule) and drinking plenty of water.
I've been trying no black out shades. The problem I'm finding now is that sunrise is at 5:30, causing me to wake up waaaay too early and get even less sleep.
It is nice though. If only you could control when the sun came up.
Oof, that is early. Perhaps something that lets through some light, like sheer curtains, so that it’ll have to rise higher before it gets bright in the room. I could see either finding a few thicknesses to accommodate changing sunrise throughout the year, a layered setup so you can close more or fewer.
Or if you want to get real fancy, I’ve seen DIY setups where blinds are controlled with some electronics to open slowly at a preset time.
I'm a coffee drinker, so the most helpful thing for me was to get a coffee machine with an automatic brew setting/alarm clock. I can set it up the night before and the smell of fresh coffee gets me out of bed.
One thing that helped me get out of bed is from a self help book, I forget which one but it might have been 5 Hour Work Week. Anyway, I'll try to take the first half-hour-to-an-hour of the day to work on a personal project before heading into work. The first part of the day is when I'm at my freshest, and I find that if the first thing I do after brushing my teeth is something I'm passionate about, it gives me something to look forward to and prevents that feeling of dread you get when you're lying in bed thinking about the shitty stuff you "have" to do throughout the day.
As far as an alarm clock goes, I have a script that runs in cron every weekday morning on my laptop that sets up an hour-ish long playlist. Each slot in the playlist is randomly chosen from a group of songs:
I also have cron jobs set up to load, shuffle, and play my library just before I get home from work and on weekend mornings.
This is weird, as a messed up night owl I share this trait with you: I love waking up before the sun. I feel as stupid silly happines when I wake up around that time. Yet I can't get myself to sleep early enough. I envy those who can spend some nights sleeping after 4am or even after dawn, then can just snap back to their normal sleep schedule.
I use a couple different things to help wake me up without wanting to murder someone. I have Hue lights fade in for ~20 minutes, when my alarm goes off. I picked a song that is calm, and feels like a “dawn song,” if that makes sense. I might hit snooze a couple times. Once I’m somewhat conscious, I’ll start reading a book that is interesting enough to keep me from wanting to go back to sleep. I’ll use the snooze as a timer for reading.
I use an alarm clock app that makes me do math problems to turn it off and it starts playing the breakdown on Bleed by Meshuggah quietly and hits maximum volume at the point where the song drops.. Normally I wake up on the quiet bit and can turn it off before it scares me awake but it does the job when I'm really deeply sleeping.
Then a double espresso before I do anything.
I read something a while back where someone said that they play the soundtrack from DOOM (2016) as their wakeup/hype routine every morning, so I guess you're doing something similar with Bleed. Seems like a pretty solid strategy to me!
Like clockwork, I wake up at 3:30am M-Sa (not Sunday). That's the time as a kid I spent 8 years waking up to start my paper route (no Sunday paper). It doesn't matter if I go to bed at 2am, I wake up at 3:30am. It doesn't matter if time changed because of Day Light Saving time. My brain just knows it's "really" now 3:30am.
Then I roll over and go back to sleep till about 5:30a and I just wake up. My alarm is set for 6am just in case. I can count on one hand how many times that alarm has actually gone off. And it's scared the crap out of my wife (and kids when they were younger). It's an ancient 1976 Lloyd's LED alarm clock/radio with a buzzer that has no modern comparison. You can hear it outside the house.
I wake up and go. I don't drag around. Just "time to get up" and I do.
But don't mess with me when I get up. My brain is on autopilot and if anything breaks my routine, chances are I'm forgetting to take something to work.
I also just go to sleep. No struggle. I kiss my wife goodnight, I close my eyes and I'm out. It really frustrates her because it can take an hour or more for her to get to sleep. I feel so sorry for people like that. Me, I could decide right now to go to sleep and I will.
I almost never feel like I'm fighting against sleep either. I'm either awake, or I'm not. My dad, both grandfather and some uncles on both sides were the same. Maybe it's genetic. My kids are not biologically mine, so I don't know. But my son can fall asleep right in the middle of a movie, or playing a game (HA, he'll keep moving his thumbs to keep the game from timing out). He's 29.
One strategy of mine I used for a while was consecutive max volume buzzer alarms on my phone. Yours sounds like that on steroids, and now I really want one.
This book (or very long web page, whatever you want to call it), really helped me a lot. Understanding what sleep is, how it works, and what we can do about it really helps a lot.
My Hue bulbs come up slowly, then I have Seven Inch Soul from SomaFM playing.
The trick is to just gtfo out of bed, regardless of how tired you are. Sometimes it's like Trinity in the Matrix ("GET UP... GET... UP!"), but get up and out quickly is the best.
I tried the barcodes, puzzle alarms, etc -- but they're only frustrating. I moved to pure will-power.
Getting up in the morning is something I still struggle with, since I can sleep through the loudest alarms.
The tactic that works best for me is planning to stand up at a certain time. The last thing I do before falling asleep is planning the next morning and specifically think that I will wake up at a certain time and imagine myself doing my morning routine. This somehow makes my body set up its own alarm and often enough I wake up before my physical alarm clock rings.
Thanks; that's a really interesting method. I'll give it a try!
Some of the ways I deal with my sleep issues.
And while probably not helpful, I've found that a job situation that accommodates my later sleeping habits helps alleviate a lot of the "problems" of sleeping in. Working 10-6 instead of 9-5/8-4 means I'm much closer to my body's natural tendencies, and that definitely helps.
I am a slave to my biological clock. If it's time to wake up, I wake up. If I go to sleep too late, it's too bad, because I'm up. Do I feel terrible and want to go to sleep? Well, too bad, 'cause the body won't do that.
It's bad when we go back or forwards by an hour. But when I need to change my sleep schedule for a weekly basis, it is hell on earth. When I need to get up early, I need to consume an ungodly amount of caffeine all day in order to function.
Lately, though, I have had a few days where I nap in the middle of the day. I suppose it's better than keeping myself awake with caffeine, but it takes up so much time it basically ruins the entire day.
If I absolutely have to wake up by a certain time (not a regular occurrence, thankfully), I set about 10 alarms on my phone to go off within about a half hour. It gradually gets me up even if I hit snooze a couple times. In the days when I was on someone else's time, I had an alarm clock that sat across the room from my bed. I wasn't necessarily a ray of sunshine when I did get up, but it worked.
At another point, I also did a routine that I suppose would fall along the lines of being intentional - as I settled in, I'd affirm to myself that I'd wake up at a specific time and visualize it happening. I found that it actually worked very reliably... as long as I got a certain minimum. I couldn't will myself awake if I tried to wing it on three or four hours, but I could do it on six everyday if I needed to. Your mileage may vary.
There are a lot of alarm apps that will detect when you're in a lighter phase of sleep and play a nice gentle sound that is enough to wake you up in that lighter phase. I use one of those, and since I have some LEDs mounted on my bed I turn those on to burning cyan to keep myself from rolling over and going back to sleep.
I use an app called sleep cycle. Instead of waking you up with a calm sound or light in the middle of your comfortable sleep and leaving you tired, it wakes you up in a lighter phase of sleep. You can give it a window of time (the recommended is 30 mins) and it will try to wake you up when your sleep is the lightest. I've tried it for a bit and every time it's woken me up easily and I haven't felt groggy or annoyed since using it.
My phone's alarm. I set two. For this coming morning, I need to be up at 8. So, I'll set one for 8:00, and one for 8:03, infinite snooze at five minute intervals. What this does is wake me up at 8, three minutes later, I get disturbed again, and two minutes after that, once more. It demotivates me to go back to sleep. I do shift work, plus school when that's in season, but this system has worked for the past six months, and I'll be keeping it.
I'm in heaven right now. My new job starts at 9:00 and the room i'm in has a balcony with a glass door. I'm an early riser and i wake up naturally when the sun shines through the curtain.
What's been working for me is just leaving the phone with the alarm clock far away from the bed, that way you have to wake up. Once you turn it off don't use it and don't sit on the bed or anything because you'll fall asleep or procrastinate again. Reminding yourself that you sort of have to go to class/work or you'll fail/get fired seems to work fine most of the days.
I usually don't have much time for breakfast because I wake up just on time to commute so I take the bus, and then grab a coffee before entering class, that usually wakes me up. I used to no do breakfast in class as to save a couple of bucks but I sometimes fell asleep in class and once I even passed out so now I don't skim on that.
Talking about sunlight I'm really jealous of all of you, I normally get about 2/3 hours of sunlight in my apartment and definitively not in the morning, so I wake up in complete darkness which is sort of screwing me up a little bit, I hope to move to a nicer place next year because it's been over a year here and I still can't get quite used to living in perpetual night once I'm inside my apartment.
To each their own, but with the addictiveness of nicotine and the questionable health safety of vaping, I don’t think this is responsible advice.
Triathlon culture is very bullish on early morning workouts to the point where there is a movement of coaches (such as Matt Dixon) trying to harp on the importance of sleep and that waking up to get the hours in is counter productive.
That being said I had always wanted to be an early morning person but never reached that state until I started triathlon training. Now when I'm training I'm up at 04:45 and feel great going for a swim -- it should be note again however, that it can be counter-productive to chronically cut sleep to get that early morning workout. I'm usually in bed by 21:00, worst case 22:00.
Triathlon may not be the answer for you, however an early morning game of squash, weightlifting, running, cycling or any sort of physical activity may help you settle into a habit where various strategies about how to wake up become less important because you were lucky enough to figure out a good why.
I had the same problem. Nothing worked. Then I got a dog who whines to be let out sometime between 6am and 7am every single day so the problem kind of resolved itself.
The other thing that helped (before the dog) was regular intensive exercise. When I did boxing 3 or 4 times a week I was usually too bushed to stay up very late. I’d end up falling asleep around 10 every night and wake up around 5 or 6.
My best advice is to be consistent. You can play around with the finer points of the morning routine, but the point is to make one part that's pretty much set in stone, that's the part that gets you going. The alarm goes off you get up. It's a learnt response, you don't have to be awake for it, as such. You get up and [complete task], and that's the wake-up point. Task can be brush teeth, eat breakfast, make coffee, whatever, but it's a set thing and it's easiest if it doesn't take more than 5mins. The point is it gets you moving.
To learn to get out of bed you start with setting an alarm for the same time every day for a month. Same alarm, same snooze, same time. And you get up every time. This sucks, so it's easiest if you get a lot of sleep, more than is needed, to make it easier to deal with. After you have done it a month, reduce your sleep time. Slowly reduce it to a point you are happy with, (half an hour a week) but don't change the time on the alarm or the snooze, and always do [task]. Then the loop is built and you'll be one of those people that wakes up and "just" gets up.
For myself I've found that consistency is the key. I get up every day at the same time, ande ven on the weekends don't go to bed (much) later and get up (much) later. I used to set an alarm clock on the weekends to stay in the habit (plus, morning runs before it gets hot in the summer are the best), but that's not necessary anymore. I tend to wake up a tad later on weekends than on weekdays, but that's mostly because I'm not as strict with my bedtime then. (That is, half an hour later or so is okay)
I also have a fixed routine in the morning (get up, small workout, shower, duolingo, and then I read for a bit until I leave for the office). I usually skip it on weekends, but I want to eventually get around and keep it up even then.