When it comes to his advice on waking up
in the morning, Ben Franklin was wrong.
Early to bed, early to rise does not constitute
a universal recipe for health, wealth, or wisdom,
and it simply doesn't work for everyone.
It does work for a lot of people though,
and I am one of those early morning people.
Every morning this week, I've actually gotten up
at 4:45 in the morning, which is kind of an insane
time to get up, but it works the best
for my current goals and my energy level.
So, I get up at that time.
I know a lot of you guys want
to establish your own habits of waking up early as well,
but you're finding that when the alarm goes off
in the morning, it can be really tough
to get yourself out of bed.
So, what I wanted to do with this video
is give you as much ammunition as I possibly can
for building a consistent habit of waking up early.
Now in my mind there are four specific elements
that go into making this habit a successful one.
And they are: getting enough sleep,
having a compelling reason to wake up in the morning,
having what I like to call an automatic wake-up response,
and getting help from apps and other people.
Now I think we talked enough about getting
adequate sleep in the previous video,
which was "How to Get to Bed on Time".
And when you're trying to wake up at an early time
in the morning, really it is getting to bed on time
that is the crucial factor here.
So, I'm not gonna talk too much about this first part
of the equation here, but check that video if you missed it.
So, let's go into the second part of the equation,
which is having a compelling reason
to wake up in the morning.
So, if you take a second here to delve into the archives
of your mind, I'm sure you can remember a time
in your life when you were extra, super motivated
to wake up early.
Could've been for a positive reason.
Maybe it was your birthday and you
really wanted to open your presents.
Or it could've been for a bad reason.
Maybe you work up and you realized
you were late for an exam.
The point is that there are things that are sufficiently
motivating to get you out of bed, no matter how early it is.
And you can take advantage of this fact
by establishing a compelling reason to get
out of bed in the morning.
That is having something you're really
excited to do the moment you wake up.
And I think it's important to talk about this
because a lot of people who wanna wake up early are
doing so they can establish morning routines.
They're really ambitious.
They wanna have this routine of habits
and activities that drives them towards long-term goals.
But the thing about long-term goals is that the rewards
don't always come right away, so it's not always enjoyable
to do everything in your morning routine in the moment.
And when your morning routine is filled
with this kinda habits, it's not exactly exciting to get up.
So if you can add at least one thing into your morning
routine that you really, truly enjoy doing,
something that's fun, it's gonna be so much
easier to get outta bed.
To give you an example, one of the parts
of my morning routine used to be to get up
and go for a half an hour walk with my favorite
daily podcast, and because it was daily,
I knew I could wake up every morning and look forward
to a new episode which made me really excited
to get outta bed.
So, the third part of the equation here is to go through
what I like to call, an automatic wake-up response
the moment your alarm goes off.
And in particular I think your automatic wake-up response
should be to jump out of bed immediately.
And the reason that doing this works so well
is because in the few minutes when you alarm goes off
in the morning, your brain is kind of at war with itself.
You've got like the rational part that
makes long term decisions and plans,
and it's kind of fighting against this more
instinctual part that just wants to go back to sleep.
And if you can get out of bed right away
before your brain even has time to come up
with an excuse for why you should hit the snooze button,
then you're gonna be a lot less
susceptible to those excuses.
Okay, so now we've come to the fourth part
of the equation, which is to get help both
from apps and tools, and other people
in case you're unable to build the first three parts
of the equation into your habit on your own.
And I wanted to give you some app recommendations up front.
And these app recommendations come
in two different categories.
One is an app that helps you get up more easily.
And then the other apps are kind of annoyance apps
that just basically won't shut up
until you do a specific thing.
So let's talk about that first category first.
I only have recommendation for you here,
but a lot of people recommend it in the comments,
and it's called Sleep Cycle Alarm.
And what it does is it uses your phone's accelerometer
to measure your movements throughout the night.
And then it uses your data to figure out what
your personal sleep cycle is and tries to wake
you up at the end of one of your sleep cycles,
so you feel more rested.
On the other end of the spectrum we've got the apps
that basically try to force you outta bed by not
turning off before you fulfill a specific requirement.
And there are a lot of these.
I'm just gonna give you a few recommendations here,
but there are definitely more.
One of them is called SpinMe and it makes you
spin around in circles before it turns off.
Another one's called Step Out of Bed
and it's kind of like a pedometer app.
It makes you take a certain
amount of steps before it turns off.
There's an app called Alarmy that makes you
go take a picture of a specific item in your house
that you set beforehand before it'll turn off.
And in a similar vain there's one called Barcode Alarm
which makes you scan a barcode that you preset.
There's also math alarm clock, and lots of other apps
that are very similar, which make you solve math problems
or logic puzzle before they'll turn off.
And hey, if none of these apps end up working,
you can always build your version of Colin Furze's
ejector bed, which is probably the most effective
method of getting out of bed ever devised.
But if early morning concussions aren't your thing,
there is more thing you can do,
which is to form an accountability group.
If you can find people who have the same goal as you,
who also want to wake up early,
then you call all team up and keep each other accountable.
And while you can find people on your campus
or in your local area to team up with,
there's also lots of ways to find people online
who would be more than willing to join a group.
I actually found a couple of sub artists that are entirely
dedicated to waking up early, so you could check those out.
Or if you wanted to, you could post a thread
in the College Info Geek community,
which I've got linked down in the description
and I'm sure many, many people would want
to join you in this crusade.
Once you've got your group established,
there are a ton of different ways
you could keep each other accountable.
Just a couple of ideas for you here.
Number one, if you guys are all in the same time zone,
or a similar one, you could actually set up
an early morning conference call.
You could do something like Skype or Google Hangouts.
Or if you wanna use your phones and there's more
than two people, you could use freeconferencecall.com
and basically just have a call every single morning
to ensure that everyone's awake.
Alternatively, you could just a habit tracking app
like Habitica, and you could all party up
and then create a challenge for waking up early,
that way each person has to wake up early
and check off the box, otherwise they will
hurt everyone else in the group.
And let me tell ya, that's pretty motivating.
So, those are the tips I have for you in this video.
And there's one thing I wanted to talk about before I go,
and it's what I eluded to in the intro, which is that
you don't have to wake up early to be successful.
It's not a prerequisite for it.
And that's why even though this is a video
about how to wake up early, I didn't spend any time
trying to persuade you to do so.
And that's because people are simply wired
to have different sleep schedules,
and there are plenty of successful people
who go to bed really, really late.
So, Ben Franklin was wrong, and there was actually
a 1998 study published in the British Medical Journal
that proved it by comparing late-risers to early-risers.
And they found that there was really no
socioeconomic differences, no cognitive differences,
no livelihood differences, really it's kind of the same.
And people who wake up late actually have
a few advantages over people who rise early.
So, my real recommendation for you in this video
is to pay close attention to your body's energy levels and
figure out at what time of the day you do your best work.
If you do really good work late at night,
then go to bed late and wake up late.
And on the other hand, if you do really good work early
in the morning, then you can use the tips in this video
to take advantage of those early morning hours.
So, hopefully you find this video useful.
What I was kinda trying to do with this video
was to create a more comprehensive resource
for building the habit of waking up early.
And I gotta say the article I wrote for this video
is actually even more detailed than this video itself is,
and there's even more resource links.
So, check it out in the card on screen right now,
or in the description down below.
If you enjoyed this video then you can give
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And if you wanna get more tips
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you can click that big red subscribe button down below.
I also wrote a book on how to earn better grades
and if you would like to get a free copy send to your email,
you can click the picture of the book right over there.
And in last week's video we talked
about how to get to bed on time
and how to figure out what your bedtime should be.
It's actually a pretty good companion to this video,
so check it out if you missed it.
Once again, if you wanna check out that full blog post
with lots of extra details and resource links,
you can click the full article button right there.
And if you'd like to connect with me,
all you need to do is go into your bathroom,
turn off the light, and say Bloody Mary
into the mirror three times.
Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next video.