Hello!
Seiiti Arata.
Everyone who has already tried to wake up earlier at some point in their lives knows
how difficult it is to change this habit.
And everyone who has searched tips on the internet on how to wake up earlier has found
obvious advice such as “have a good night’s sleep, place your alarm clock far away from
your reach, don’t hit the snooze button…”
Today’s conversation will be different.
We’ll talk about some unusual techniques you can use to wake up earlier without it
becoming a sacrifice or damaging your productivity throughout the day.
This conversation is aimed at those of you who need to wake up earlier in order not to
be late for work anymore, to have some extra time in your morning routine, or to those
who simply want to feel healthier by adjusting their sleep schedule.
Let’s start.
Our first tip is: have a good night’s sleep, place your alarm clock far away from your
reach…
I’m joking!
Before we go over the tips, let’s first understand why you’re not able to wake up
earlier.
Not being able to wake up early is a consequence.
To get rid of the consequence, you need to identify the cause first.
If you’re not able to wake up early, there’s a reason for that.
You’re probably not fully rested yet, or you may have woken up during the night, or
you just don’t have a good reason to change your habits.
Not being able to wake up early is the consequence.
But you don’t have to fight the consequence itself.
First, you need to identify the causes, whatever motivates that consequence.
Once you eliminate the causes, the consequence will be resolved.
Try to think about the reasons.
Maybe you have kids and they wake up constantly during the night?
Do you bring the unfinished work home, so it stays in your head throughout the night?
Do you go to bed at the right time, but you stay up another two hours watching tv before
going to sleep?
Do you try to fall asleep with the light, the tv or music on?
No tip about waking up earlier will ever work if your situation and your needs aren’t
clear to you.
Be honest with yourself.
Which are your priorities?
Or are you just following some influencers who say that waking up earlier makes you happier,
healthier and more productive?
There are indeed researches that state that it’s good to follow the circadian cycle
and try to go to sleep around the time when the Sun goes down, and wake up at sunrise.
But there are also researches that show that there are naturally morning people and night-time
people.
[source: https://arata.se/source-xf5f].
Something every study agrees on is claiming that sleep deprivation is VERY harmful to
your health [sources: https://arata.se/source-smay | https://arata.se/source-yjf0 | https://arata.se/source-11de
| https://arata.se/source-3gug | https://arata.se/source-sb9r].
So, if you just want to wake up earlier to do more things at the expense of hours of
sleep, please reconsider your strategy.
It’s better to wake up a bit later and sleep the necessary amount of time than to wake
up earlier and suffer the effects of sleep deprivation.
Now that this is clear, let’s find out about some unusual techniques that you can use to
finally wake up earlier.
1 - Time travel.
The future will tell you if waking up earlier was worth it.
The first unusual technique to wake up earlier is understanding the benefits this habit will
bring into your life in the long-term.
To do that, grab a pen and a piece of paper and write down what you’re going to do with
the extra time.
Now imagine how these activities will build up with time and bring you benefits.
For example, let’s say you have back pain, lack of flexibility, difficulty to breath.
You want to practise yoga, but you never find the time in the middle of your busy routine.
So you decide to wake up half an hour earlier and use those thirty extra minutes to practise
yoga as your first activity of the day.
Even before the rest of the people at the house wake up, even before checking your phone
or your daily rush begins.
If you do this every single day, each week you’ll have built up three and a half hours
of yoga.
In a month, that’ll be fifteen hours.
In a year, a hundred and eighty hours of yoga practise.
How would your back pain, your flexibility and your breathing be after one hundred and
eighty hours of yoga?
This is just an example.
It can be followed for almost anything.
Write down what you’re going to do with your extra time and imagine the accumulated
benefits in the future.
Now, if you want to wake up earlier but don’t have any plan on how to use that extra time,
it may be best to just keep sleeping.
Half an hour more of sleep time may be better for you than waking up earlier to just stay
in bed checking your social media or being sleepy all day long...
2 - Use Artificial Intelligence to wake up at your lightest sleep stage.
Our sleep works in cycles.
One of the issues with traditional alarm clocks is that they will go off at the selected time,
whether you’re in a lighter or in a deeper sleep phase.
When you’re awakened at your deepest sleep phase, you probably won’t feel too well
and you’ll want to go back to sleep.
This doesn’t happen when you’re awakened at your lightest sleep phase.
One way of solving this is using alarm clocks with some sort of Artificial Intelligence
that wake you up when you’re in the lightest sleep phase.
With these alarm clocks, you establish a time frame you want to wake up in.
For example, you set that you want to wake up between six and half past six in the morning.
The alarm clock will track your sleep and, within that established time frame, it will
go off when you’re in a lighter sleep phase.
There are also smartwatches and even smart rings that you can use to do this type of
monitoring.
But your phone also does the job.
Apps like Sleep Cycle [https://arata.se/ksau09] and other similar ones use your phone’s
microphone to track your sleep and wake up at your lightest sleep phase.
Besides that, these sleep-tracking apps will show you how your sleep night was, how much
time you stayed in bed, how much time you actually slept, if you snored, or woke up
in the night… they provide you some data that can help you sleep better and make it
easier for you to wake up earlier.
3 - Don’t get up as soon as your alarm clock goes off.
The snooze button can be your friend.
Who hasn’t hit the snooze button?
Who has never thought “just five more minutes…” when the alarm goes off every time you say
you’ll wake up earlier?
Almost every advice about how to wake up earlier tells you to never hit the snooze button.
For example, you’ve already seen at https://arata.se/aratasummary01 the tips from The Miracle Morning book, remember?
There are a lot of well-known tips to help you get out of bed as soon as the alarm goes
off.
So you can start your day at full speed and be healthier, happier and more productive.
Well, let’s think about it.
Why, despite all of these tips, people are tempted to hit the snooze button everytime
the alarm goes off?
If wanting to stay in bed is so natural… is there a reason for that?
Perhaps your body wants to wake up slowly.
Stay in bed for a bit.
Enjoy the first few moments of the morning before the daily activities.
Try making a friend out of the snooze button and set two alarms: one for the beginning
and another one for the end of the waking up process.
The first one is for you to start waking up.
The second one will let you know it’s time to get out of bed so you don’t delay your
personal and professional obligations.
An excellent way of making your waking-up process gradual is using a LED light alarm
clock https://arata.se/ledsleepalarm which mimics the sunrise.
It begins with a dim light and works its way up, with an option to play different peaceful
sounds to wake up naturally.
Arrange how much time your waking-up process will take.
If you want to spend some time in bed to read a book, to write a journal, or even check
your social media, do it!
Do whatever you want to do, whatever works for you, no matter what other people say.
In order to make long-lasting habits, the ideal is to make those habits pleasurable.
If waking up earlier to immediately get out of bed and start your daily activities brings
you peace, then great.
But if it brings you pleasure to wake up earlier and stay in bed for a while to start your
day, that’s algo great!
Do whatever brings you more pleasure without interrupting your day to day, and you’ll
see it’s much easier to create the habit of waking up earlier.
Try to create a morning ritual that reduces stress.
If the first hours of your morning were more pleasant, it would be easier for you to decide
to wake up earlier.
4 - Schedule appointments with other people.
If it’s necessary, hire a personal trainer to wake up earlier.
For a strange reason, you find it harder to break commitments with other people than breaking
the ones you have with yourself.
If you wake up earlier and let your brain rationalise whether you should go back to
bed, you will break your commitments sooner or later.
A solution for this is to schedule appointments with other people in the first hours of the
morning.
For example, you could promise to go to the gym early in the morning with a friend.
Or schedule a French lesson with a private teacher early in the morning.
It could be an online class, the important thing is to have someone who’s waiting for
you at a predetermined time.
If you want to go further, you could hire a personal trainer to help you create this
new habit of waking up earlier.
The statistics of habit creation apps, like Coach.me [https://arata.se/yz85], show that
people who hire a personal trainer are three hundred percent more likely to form a habit.
Inside Coach.me you can find and hire trainers who will help you establish your new habit
of waking up earlier.
5 - Take a coffee just before taking a nap.
A lot of people are actually able to wake up earlier, but they become sleepy during
the day.
This affects your productivity, your concentration skills and even your mood.
The best solution is to take a short nap during the day.
Studies show that naps up to twenty-five minutes long, known as power naps, are ideal to restore
your energy.
If you sleep more than that during the day, you could fall into a deeper sleep.
This will affect your power to sleep well at night.
If you like coffee, a good trick is to have a cup of coffee right before taking your afternoon
nap.
So, you drink the coffee, you go to sleep and, by the end of the nap, you’ll wake
up thanks to the effect of the caffeine.
Studies have already shown the positive effect of this technique, known as coffee nap [source:
https://arata.se/source-h88t].
You just need to avoid doing this very close to the time you go to sleep.
The ideal would be to avoid having caffeine at least eight hours before going to sleep.
That’s why the best time to take a coffee nap is right after lunch, if your routine
allows it.
6 - Fall asleep faster to wake up earlier.
Switch your tv for visualization.
When we decide to wake up earlier, one of the first approaches is to go to bed earlier.
But going to bed earlier doesn’t mean we’re going to fall asleep earlier.
People who have issues falling asleep may spend more than an hour trying to sleep.
And that usually means they will end up watching tv or going through their phone when they’re
in bed.
To avoid that, you can create a rule: don’t allow electronic devices in your room.
Remove your tv, laptop and tablet from your room, find an alarm clock that’s not in
your phone, and even remove sound devices if necessary.
Instead of watching tv, try to practise visualization to fall asleep faster.
Take a deep breath, close your eyes and visualise calm and relaxing scenes.
Try to experience this with as many details as possible.
Whenever your mind starts to think about other things, gently bring your attention back to
the visualisation.
This exercise helps you relax and could make you fall asleep faster.
7 - Wake up just a minute earlier.
And celebrate that minute as a great victory.
The time you wake up is a habit.
Your body gets used to that schedule and crates biological needs according to that habit.
If you suddenly decide you’ll stop waking up at ten in the morning and begin to wake
up at six in the morning, your body could be shocked.
Such a drastic change can deregulate some biological functions.
Thus, your brain will try everything it can to go back to the old routine.
This means: you need to be realistic.
Have smaller expectations and try to start slowly.
Instead of waking up at ten, try to wake up at half past nine.
If you can’t make this happen, try to wake up just one minute earlier each day.
By the end of the month, you’ll be able to wake up half an hour earlier.
You can keep doing this gradual change until you reach your desired schedule.
Of course it doesn’t have to be just a minute, you can try and adjust the time every day
or every week.
The important thing is to not be too harsh on yourself.
Of course it’ll be easier for some people to make an extreme and drastic change, but
a gradual change may be the only thing that works for other people’s bodies in the long-term.
There isn’t a unique solution for everyone, you have to test which one is best for you.
When you find the right time to wake up at, try to be as consistent as possible.
Try to go to sleep and wake up around the same time everyday.
When you create this habit, your body gets used to the routine of waking up earlier and
finally becomes something you can do without any struggle.
Waking up earlier is not an easy task for many people.
In today’s conversation, you learned that it’s possible to use unusual techniques
like AI, making peace with the snooze button or even hiring a personal trainer to help
you wake up earlier.
Besides these unusual tricks and tips, you can’t forget about the common ones.
Making your room as dark and quiet as possible, leaving your smartphone out of reach, drinking
camomile tea… all of this known information is still relevant.
Now that you’re able to wake up earlier, you can use that extra time to produce more
and better.
If you want to learn how to make the most out of your time, I’ll invite you to watch
a special class from our Productivity Ninja course about time management.
To watch the class right now, just click on https://arata.se/timemanagement