- Good morning, good life, everyone.
Welcome back to Amy TV where we come together
to help you go after the life that you want.
You've heard me talk a million times before
about the benefits of waking up early.
If you haven't, there are so many benefits
to waking up early
but you've probably been in this same position as I have
at one time or another or at least eight million times
where you just couldn't get out of bed when you wanted to.
So today I'm sharing seven tips that I have
if you would like to actually wake up early
and not just make that cute little plan
that doesn't come true.
(calm music)
It's a pretty well known fact that I am a lark.
A lark is somebody who likes to wake up
in the early morning.
I was not always this way, okay?
I know you probably think I'm extroverted, I'm not.
I know you probably think I'm a morning person, I'm not.
There's a lot of things that I make myself
seem like I am but I am not
and that is the beauty of the internet, my friends.
I'm just kidding.
There are a lot of things you have to do
in order to better train yourself in certain areas.
You don't have to be naturally good at it
but if you have the incentive to go after the life you want,
to improve in areas that you know are good for you
then you can make it happen.
Why is waking up early something that you should do?
Well, there are countless studies
as to why this is good for you.
Do your own little Google search
and find out what matters to you the most
and how morning routines can potentially affect it
hopefully for the better
and you will probably find you have a pretty good reason
to make this adjustment in your life
but the issue still stands.
You actually have to get out of bed
in order to have a morning routine
and I don't know about you
but I love sleep as much as my mornings
and my bed is a dream to stay in.
So if you actually wanna make this happen
and work on the habit that is waking up earlier,
there are a few things that I recommend
so that you can actually make that first one happen
and maybe the second one and continue the process
because simply saying tomorrow I'm getting up at five a.m.
doesn't get you out of bed at five a.m.
Before we get started, you know what time it is.
I have to give a little bit of Twitter gratitude
and this shout out is going to nightlybreeze.
Brianna, thank you so much for your time and attention.
I acknowledge you for watching these videos, for listening.
Maybe you're working on your morning routine, who knows,
but no matter what, I appreciate that
and thank you for the retweet.
I mean, following me on Twitter,
retweeting the video when it comes out,
that's the whole reason I picked your name.
If you'd like a chance at the next shout out,
follow Brianna's lead and follow me on Twitter
and also look for my video when it comes out
every Sunday and Wednesday
so you can potentially get this next Twitter gratitude.
Alright, seven tips to actually wake up early.
Key word actually, you know that big first step out of bed.
It takes a little bit of preparation.
First, you need to find your passion.
Okay, wait a minute, I know that's a lot.
It's a lot to think about but hear me out.
We just talked about this last week
and I think it's critical.
One of the big reasons I have found it to be so much easier
and it's so hard but so much easier to get out of bed
is because I know why I'm doing it.
Actually, multiple passions come into play here,
not just the fact that I love my work, I love what I do
and I'm waking up to do that every single day.
That is motivating but I am also passionate
about mornings that are very quiet with no people around me.
That motivates me.
That doesn't happen at nine a.m.
That doesn't happen at seven a.m.
My husband wakes up and we start talking because why?
We're married, we love each other, all that happy stuff
but I never got my quiet time.
So if I really want that, I gotta get up at five a.m.
I'm passionate about that
but I'm also passionate about what I'm getting up to do.
Take care of myself and then do something to help the world.
When you find your passion and this is actually a little bit
more of a process so if you haven't figured this out yet,
you may not wake up early tomorrow.
I'm not gonna guarantee that
but if you have found something that you're excited about
then you very well could.
I have a video on this, finding your passion,
and even though it's gonna be more of a process
than a discovery, I promise you it's gonna make you feel
like you have more purpose every single morning.
Go check out that video and let me know what you thought.
The next thing you're gonna need to do
if you wanna wake up earlier is go to sleep earlier.
I have said this so many times.
It's basically tattooed on my face.
Love sleep, go to bed early.
It's the dream.
I know I sound old.
You've still gotta get ample sleep.
In order for you to be effective early in the morning
or effective in the afternoon
if you woke up early in the morning,
you need to have x number of hours of sleep
and it's different for everyone.
For me, I'm good with seven.
If I don't get to a minimum of seven, I'm in trouble.
I'm not gonna wake up early if I went to bed at two a.m.
This happens sometimes.
I'll land off of a plane, I'll come home
and it's super late.
I'm gonna sleep in the next day to get my hours of sleep.
So if you're wanting to wake up early,
you've gotta recoup that sleep somewhere
and it's gonna be in the evenings where maybe you stayed up
a little bit too late watching Netflix.
Relatable, I think so.
Start thinking about what you've been doing
for the last week or so in your evenings.
Are you just mindlessly watching television?
Do you tend to fall into a happy hour situation
on a very regular basis with your coworkers
where if you have a drink or two
and that takes two or three hours with your friends at a bar
or whatever, you go late into the evening
and then suddenly you didn't really get a night at home
for you to start your next day fresh.
You don't even have to drink for that to be true.
If you're spending too much time in the evenings
doing something that is less important to you
than what could happen the next morning,
how are you gonna fix that?
You only have so much time in the world.
So think about how you can start saying no
to things that don't matter to you as much.
Another thing that we recently talked about.
You can check out a video on how you can do that
much more confidently but if you wanna get up earlier,
you've gotta go to bed earlier.
Figure out what your sleep cycle preferences are,
for me again, seven hours, I'm good and then do it.
What I love about iPhone is that it actually has an option
to say this is my bedtime and this is my awake time
and it'll be your alarm for both going to bed and waking up.
So getting that cute little notification that's like,
hi, girl, it's time to go to bed in like an hour,
it's a nice heads up as to okay,
I need to start shutting some things down.
Get to bed.
I promise you you will fall right back in love with sleep
as much as you did The Crown.
They're really neck and neck for me.
And the third thing I wanna tell you
is to write down three things
and this should be the night before
or just in advance of your morning.
What are three things you wanna focus on tomorrow?
Successful people tell you
you shouldn't have too many focuses in one day.
So write down what are the three things
you would like to accomplish in any given day?
It could be something you're gonna do in the morning.
It could be something you have planned in the evening.
It could be your full time job
which takes up eight hours of your day.
Write those three things down
because when you start to look at what you would like to do,
you're more motivated to think,
hm, I'm gonna need a little bit more time in my day
for that to be feasible.
I can't cut into work time.
I can't cut into spending time with my family.
I can't cut into making dinner for my family.
Whatever it is, when you're looking at that list
of just three things, it's feasible
but you also start thinking about the structure of your day
and therefore how you're gonna fit it in
and once you look at things in a calendar
scheduling type of way,
it's not just an arbitrary date to wake up early.
I don't wake up and go,
I'm going on a date with myself in the morning.
That's now that I'm doing.
I am making the most of the time that I have
but you can't make the most of the time that you have
if you don't have a vision for why.
Write it down, make a list, journaling.
We've been talking about this for eons like internet eons.
My next piece of advice and this is my holy grail tip
for waking up early because I still do it every single day,
put your alarm clock in another room.
I used to be able to just put it in my master bathroom
and that would be good enough
and then the phone was still close enough at night
where I felt like it was safe but now I first of all
do not care about my phone within an hour of going to bed
and within like three hours of waking up in the morning.
Also, the bathroom was too close.
I actually got very good at waking up,
turning the alarm off and going right back to bed.
Okay, that's not helpful, anybody, that is not helpful.
That is like some sleepwalking stuff.
That's just not fair.
Now, I put my phone in its own little bed
which is really just a phone charger in my office, okay,
so it's in here, this is the room where I get things done
so I'm in the environment where it's time to start the day
and I'm going to want to do a lot of things in here.
I'll shut the alarm off and then the next thing I know
I am in the bathroom getting ready for the day
just waking myself up.
You might find that keeping your phone
next to the coffee maker in the morning is a great idea.
Maybe you even set the coffee maker
to already have made your coffee
by the time you're hitting that alarm.
Hm, pro tip.
Can you tell I like coffee, I'm not sure
but the key is that I think we have gotten
so natural with these devices
that we are just picking them up all the time
and we know what buttons we're pushing
and sometimes Siri just pushed her own buttons and whatever
that if this is next to your bed and you turn it off,
it's happening subconsciously.
Have you done that because I do it all the time.
If this is next to my bed which it is sometimes
on the weekends, not all the time,
I will totally hit the alarm and go right back to sleep
and when I actually naturally wake up,
I don't even know that it happened and I'm like how, how?
That is scary so you've gotta get it away from you.
Get your body to move in order for you to know
it's time to get up.
For those of you who say I like to wake up naturally
and it's easy for me, I cannot relate to you, okay, sorry.
So the next thing I recommend is self-care first.
As I said before, I turn the alarm off
and the very first thing that I do is go and do my skincare.
Maybe you prefer a shower or exercise, meditation,
whatever you want.
For me, it's skincare on my face.
It gets the crusties out of my eyes.
It makes me feel like I'm totally awake
and that I couldn't just crash right back on to a pillow.
It's just exactly what I need
to put one foot in front of the other effectively
for the next few hours.
If you're interested in my skincare routine,
I will link to that in the description below
but that's just what I need
and I think when you start with self-care,
you're saying that this is important enough to me
that I'm making time for myself, not some other deadline,
not somebody's text message, not email.
I'm doing this for me and that's why I believe self-care
is the best thing to start with.
Now that you've done that,
maybe you grabbed yourself a lemon water or a cup of coffee
or whatever, cup of tea, you want
first thing in the morning.
Now we gotta look at that list again, okay?
What are my three focuses?
Maybe you've calendar blocked your schedule for the day.
That's how I do things but maybe you just look at that list
of three things and say okay,
time to get started on this list.
Ideally, you're gonna work on the thing
that's either the hardest and not scheduled
or just something that's not gonna happen
at another point in the day.
If you don't know the joy
that is in having something on your to-do list
already done by the time the sun comes up,
I cannot recommend it more.
I'm just gonna pull up my calendar
of what I did this morning.
So Lucy kept me up a little bit last night
so I didn't get up till 5:30
and I spend about an hour on my morning routine.
By 6:30, I started working on projects
that I needed to get done and by nine a.m.,
I had three things off my to-do list.
I don't have a list of three things
because I calendar block things I have to get done
and I know if something takes 30 minutes
then it's 30 minutes,
if something else takes 60 minutes, it's 60 minutes
and something else on my calendar took 90 minutes
and that took 90 minutes but knowing how long it took,
booking it in my calendar, I got it all done
before everybody else is even clocking in for work
and then I'm just moseying outside walking my dog
and I'm like, oh my God, I feel so good.
I'm telling you, there is something so motivating
about the fact that you can go back and look at that list,
you can look at your calendar, you can do whatever you do
and say I'm doing pretty good already
and the rest of the world
is just drinking their first coffee.
I get so much satisfaction out of that.
I just feel like I wanna share that with everyone
and the last piece of advice that I have for you
when it comes to actually waking up is that this is a habit.
This means that you have to work on it.
It is not gonna be natural to you.
It's not gonna be easy especially if you hate it right now.
If you have genuine hatred for it
and everyone's telling you you gotta do it
just like they tell you to eat your vegetables
and you're like, ugh, not interested.
This is going to take time.
So my advice is that you need to observe the obstacles
when they're happening
so that you can start to work on beating them down.
I haven't had the most fluid time ever waking up early.
I know there are a lot of parents out there
who are like I made some plans and then the kid told me
that that's just not gonna work for them today
and then now what do you do?
It's not going to be easy.
We all have our own issues in how this happens
but if you start to identify them and say,
okay, this happened today, this happened again today,
this happened again for the third day in a row,
this is an obstacle we need to work on,
how can we combat it?
For me, I've always grappled with
when am I gonna go to the gym
because I can't go first thing in the morning when I wake up
and I also don't like going first thing in the morning
when I wake up but everybody tells you to go do it
when you wake up and I'm like I don't want to.
I would rather go after I got four things off my to-do list
and I took Lucy for a walk so she can sleep
and then I go to the gym
and so I'm really not going to the gym till like nine
or 10 o'clock anymore
and that's just something that continues to be fluid
and changes in my life.
It's one little obstacle that I present to you
that I had to work on.
We all have our obstacles.
This isn't gonna be simple, easy.
If everyone could do it, they would.
If everyone wanted to do it,
it probably wouldn't be as valuable.
If everyone was waking up at five a.m.,
I wouldn't get my alone time.
I wouldn't be able to avoid emergencies.
I wouldn't be able to be ahead of the game.
We know that the majority of people don't do this.
You know the majority of people don't do this.
So if you could be in the minority
and you know because of studies
and the people that you're surrounding yourself with
telling you that this is a great idea,
why would you not do it at this point?
Why would you not work on it at this point?
I feel like we just went to church.
So don't get frustrated or you know what?
Frustrating moments happen.
Just let 'em happen.
Try again tomorrow.
Get to bed early.
Write your list down.
Be prepared and continue to find the things
you need to work on and then work on them
and then suddenly this whole getting up at this hour
is not this crazy thing that people talk about.
Now, you do it and you're finding new ways to optimize it.
We're trying to get to the intermediate class
of waking up early, right?
101, let's get past 101.
Alright, let's share what we talked about today
in a tweetable.
This one is from George Lorimer.
You've gotta wake up every morning with determination
if you're going to go to bed with satisfaction.
Alright, I wanna hear from you.
Let's talk about those obstacles.
What is the hardest part of waking up early for you?
Let's work on it together in the comments below.
That's all for today, thank you so much for tuning in.
I appreciate it as always.
Make sure you subscribe for good vibes,
kiss the ones you love and go after the life you want.
Cheers.
No Lucy in this episode of Amy TV
because she was getting hot flashes
which is really relatable with these lights.
She's actually on the balcony right now.
Is that bad parenting, I should go check on her.