i university i woke up at 4 45 a.m every single day seven days a week it was the first time in my
life that i woke up that early on a consistent basis because it was only at university that i
realized how waking up early could double my productivity throughout the day so let
me take you back to when i was at high school i hated waking up earlier i mean honestly i
absolutely hated it every morning i had to wake up at 7 00 am just for school and it was just awful
so when my alarm clock went off i'd feel exhausted and every part of my body would be telling me to
hit the snooze button and continue sleeping fast forward a few years to university and i made a
complete u-turn i went from hating waking up at 7am to actively wanting to wake up at 4
45am i went from struggling to wake up at seven every morning to relatively easily being able
to wake up at 4 45 every morning and i'll tell you how i did that because there are some really
quite simple strategies that you can implement so you can wake up super early in a kind of easy way
and i'll talk about those strategies later on in the video but first i just launched my first ever
skillshare course it's absolutely free for the next couple of weeks it's called study smarter
not how to decrease your study time by 50 and i go through basically from a to z how to decrease
the number of hours you study by studying more efficiently i hate this idea of people studying
12 hours a day when it's just not necessary you can click on the link in the description below
like i said the course will be completely free for the next couple of weeks so you have nothing
to lose so i'll talk a bit about why i love waking up at 4 45 am and how it significantly increased
my productivity but first and foremost i'm at my most productive in the morning so as soon as
i wake up i feel at my most productive then in the afternoon my energy levels kind of start to
drop and i feel a bit tired and lethargic so my productivity takes a hit then a few hours later
in the like late afternoon evening and night time my energy levels recover and i'm productive again
so it makes sense to get at least a few hours of studying done first thing in the morning right
so at university at 4 45 am the first thing i do is shower then i'd go to the gym for an hour and
get that out of the way early on in the day and then go to the library to study and i'd arrive
at the library at around 7 15 a.m and this was motivational in itself because i was almost always
the first student in the library so studying in the library when i knew that most of the people
were sleeping or just waking up like i was doing something different to everyone else as the saying
goes to be an anomaly you have to act like one right so sitting down in the morning to study i'd
study for about three hours during the day but it would be intense studying i mean i would get
more done in these three hours of studying than i probably would in the entire day which is crazy to
think about just because i had no distractions and i was completely focused on my work and i
taught quite a lot about how to make your studying more efficient without having to be studying crazy
hours the more intense and focused your studying is the fewer hours you have to study my entire
transforming grades in 30 days course is kind of based around that premise it gives you everything
you need to know to completely level up your studying and your grades in one neat package you
can check it out there's a link in the description below and to this very day i still wake up super
early because there are far fewer distractions in the morning no one is messaging me on facebook no
one is emailing me no one is asking for help and it's a few hours before anyone else in my house
wakes up so it's completely silent and as a result i can enter into a state of flow relatively easily
and so i can get more work done in the first three hours in the morning than i do the rest of the day
another kind of positive side effects to this is because i've had a really productive morning that
positive momentum carries me throughout the day so not only have i got a lot done in the morning
but now i feel more motivated and energized to continue the day with that level of productivity
and that's a big deal i mean how many times i know at least for me if i've had a really unproductive
morning then it's likely that the rest of my day will continue being unproductive but if i have a
really productive morning then the rest of my day will probably be productive too so waking up early
is really good for my frame of mind how often do you find yourself in a frantic rush in the morning
to leave the house on time to go to school or university living in a stressful state is not an
ideal way to start your day instead you can wake up say two hours earlier and get an hour of focus
studying done get some exercise done maybe you can meditate too and have a healthy breakfast or read
a chapter of a book it's a far less stressful and more pleasant way to start your day right
so then you know the benefits of waking up early now is the hardest part how do you do it and i've
kind of gone through this transition where i've really struggled to wake up every morning to then
waking up at 4 45 relatively easily so how did i do it and it's really quite simple i built the
structure of habits around me so a set of very basic actions that i carried out every single
morning seven days a week so first off i'd make sure i was in bed by 9 pm every night now that was
non-negotiable and this is often what people have the most problems with they set an alarm
for the morning and they wonder why they can't wake up in the morning but really they're doing
it backwards they should be setting an alarm for the night time for when they need to be in bed by
because if you get seven to eight hours of sleep it will be a lot easier to wake up in the morning
when your alarm goes off and secondly i had a solid nighttime routine i realized that if i
watch youtube videos at nighttime then i wouldn't be able to fall asleep for at least an hour and
i realized that when watching youtube videos my mind is kind of stimulated and so i start to feel
more awake than more tight and that's obviously a problem right so i've realized that reading a book
or listening to a podcast or even just watching a film on netflix makes me fall asleep a lot faster
and for the first few weeks it was difficult i'm gonna be honest with you i really had to
use self-discipline to go to sleep early and wake up early especially when my alarm went off in the
morning but eventually after probably two or three weeks it wasn't long before it started to become a
habit so it started to become easy to wake up at 4 45 a.m in fact it would get to the point where it
got so easy that i would naturally wake up five or ten minutes before my alarm clock went off and the
third thing i did was that i woke up and i went to bed at the same time every day seven days a
week now this is really important i think is a big reason why it became so easy for me to sleep early
and to wake up early and it works because our bodies have their own regulatory system called
the circadian rhythm it's a kind of internal clock that makes your body feel alert during the day and
sleep at night and waking up and going to bed at the same time each day can help your internal
clock keep a regular schedule so once your body adjusts to your schedule after you've been waking
up and going to sleep at the same time let's say for a couple of weeks then it will become
far easier now there is one cavite to all of this there have been several studies that show that
some people are early birds and others are night owls it's in our genetics there's not
a lot we can do about it but there's a theory that hundreds of thousands of years ago when we
were cavemen and living in tribes most of the tribe would sleep at night but a few people
had to stay awake overnight to guard the camp from predators like saber-toothed tigers and
lions and snakes and whatnot so some people have evolved to naturally be more awake at night time
now that's just a theory i don't know whether it's true but it does kind of make sense but even
if you are a night owl i would suggest at least trying to wake up early for a period of a month
or two months because for my whole life up until university i thought that i was a night owl too
and it turns out i'm absolutely not and if you want more advice on how to wake up early because
honestly it changed my life in the way that i live in terms of productivity and just general overall
happiness i made a video on how i easily wake up at 4 45 am every morning i go into it in more
detail than this video and i also made a video on how i stay productive when i'm feeling unmotivated
both are really important videos when it comes to productivity and again my skillshare course on how
to study smarter rather than harder is absolutely free link down below and i'll see you over
there