It’s hard to be a night owl in a world that is built for early risers and tremendously rewards them. Schools start at 8 AM 9-5. Wake up pretty much at the same time. It seems like an early-bird routine is going around the world. Continue reading for the ways to wake up early if you’re also a night owl but want to wake up early.
Ways To Wake Up Early
1. Firstly Ask Yourself Why You Want To Wake Up Early
Learning how to wake up early is not as easy as turning off the lights and going to bed early. The psychology behind it is also important.
Ask yourself, “What would I get if I wake up early before you sleep tonight? Whatever you answer, make sure you really want it because that’s what you’re going to use to persuade yourself to leave your bed when the alarm goes off.
2. Apply Early To Bed And Early To Rise Rule In Stages
Train your body to predict sleep. Yes, you can do that every day by waking up and sleeping at the same time. But if you’re a night owl, it won’t help you to bed at 8 a.m. every day.
It is also difficult to wake up at 6 p.m., and then quickly try to sleep at 12 midnight. Do it in stages, so say 8 AM, sleep 15 minutes earlier and wake up 15 minutes earlier instead of sleeping at the same time.
Unlike other early waking ideas, this is very practical as it is only a minor change. You’re not even going to feel the difference of 15 minutes! You can adjust your sleep by 15 minutes later the next day, so you’ll wake up 30 minutes earlier than usual. If you do this on an ongoing basis, in less than a month you will be a morning person.
3. Change The Environment For Your Benefit
Hide all light sources, even the small red light that indicates the TV is off. Put your phones away and stop watching TV at least one hour before bedtime, as the blue light from these screens disrupts the body’s secretion of melatonin, a hormone that controls your sleep cycle.
Use a real book and a night light if you want to read. Keep the bedroom in a comfortable chill. Invest in soundproofing your room or get an app that plays calming noises to drown out the noise if you live in a noisy neighborhood.
4. Don’t Take Nap After 7 Hours Of Waking Up
Make sure you nap early—not later than 7 hours after you woke up if you feel sleepy. Napping after 7 hours, your sleeping routine would be broken up to make you sleep late and wake up late, again.
5. Don’t Read Self-Help Books, News Or Emailing
The email reminds you of work news is just going to stress you, while self-help books are going to excite and fill your brain with ideas — none of them will help you sleep. Alternatively, read fiction, preferably short stories that don’t get you excited or novels you’ve read before.
6. Build A Wind-Down Routine
What you do before bedtime is the trigger for your body to sleep, so try to relax and stick to them like a routine.
You may take a cold shower, for example, and then read a book 15 minutes before bedtime. When you stick to this routine long enough, your body will soon realize that the day has finished with these tasks and it’s time to relax. It is also necessary to do these activities in order and every day at approximately the same time.
7. Trick Your Brain To Get Up Early
When your alarm goes off, what’s your first reaction? Hit snooze and go back to sleep, right? For this tip, you can snooze, but get up this time rather than going straight back to sleep, but only for 10 minutes.
This is known as inverted snooze. Instead of pushing yourself to get up immediately, start negotiating with yourself. It’s just 10 minutes. “It’s up to you what you do in those 10 minutes, but the rule is that you can’t go back to bed— or sleep on the couch. You can open windows, prepare your coffee, or turn on your TV. Then you’re already fully awake and unlikely to be hit snooze when the alarm timer goes off again.
8. Resist the urge for “5 more minutes”
You wake up five minutes before your alarm by some horrible twist of fate. What are you going to do? Sleep for the remaining 5 minutes, right? ⠀Wrong.
It might not be worth the extra 5 minutes to go back to bed because it can put you in a deeper cycle of sleep, making it harder to get up when your alarm goes off. That’s why people wake up when they press snooze and go back to sleep for 5-15 minutes, thinking the time went by quickly.
These are some of the ways to wake up early which you can try to be a morning person.
Are you a night owl struggling in an early world of birds to survive? Follow these tips and see how it’s going to work for you. If you’ve done everything–as in everything in this article, plus a lot of advice from a sleep specialist–don’t lose heart. Nobody said that at 5 AM you had to wake up to be an early bird, much less a successful person.
Also Read: Breathing Exercises For Better Sleep
