How to become a morning person
From a lifestyle fuelled by copious amounts of coffee combined with study sessions that took me into the early hours of each morning - my body clock was a complete mess during my university days.
I had always wanted to become a morning person but based on my lifestyle at the time, it seemed impossible to achieve. I vividly remember how my mum would jokingly refer to me as a vampire for being up until 5am watching movies each night. And yet now 10 years later living in Japan - I can finally call myself a morning person.
These days I now wake up at 5am which gives me the chance to do Yoga, go for a run, have a full hour weight training session and fit in a bit of Japanese study, all before I head to work for an 8am start. Your circumstances will undoubtably be different to mine, but one fact remains true. By waking up a little bit earlier each day to prioritise something that you care about - you will gain an advantage over everybody else that doesn’t.
Below are 5 things that I have learned which have helped me transform myself from a so-called vampire into a very productive early bird.
1. Your reason for waking up early is everything.
Perhaps the most important factor that determines how easily you get out of bed in the morning is your reason for waking up early. Our reasons for waking up affect our mindsets a lot more than we realise. For example - many of us associate waking up early with getting ready for work which may be the last thing we want to do, even if we enjoy our jobs.
When we have a negative association with waking up early, we are less motivated to get out of bed, so we need to give ourselves something to look forward to. I have two things that I look forward to every morning - the first being my weight training session as it has become my sacred, uninterrupted time to focus on myself. For reasons still unknown to me, I find that I am at my most creative when I am lifting weights, so I always keep a notebook close so that I can to jot down any thoughts or ideas that come to me in-between sets.
The second thing I look forward to every morning is listening to a new music playlist or podcast along with my morning coffee from my Nespresso machine. I absolutely love the smell coffee in the morning and the scent alone awakens my senses more than the hit of caffeine does. This combination often puts me into a state of flow and as long I have enjoyed these two things in the morning, I am mentally ready for whatever the day may bring.
2. Your bedtime routine will help you seize the morning.
Your bedtime routine needs to set you up to get the best possible sleep and what you do for that last hour before you go to bed has the greatest impact on this.
To prepare yourself for sleep, you need to let your mind wind down. This is one area that technology has certainly hindered us as many of us spend our nights getting lost in the world of YouTube, Netflix, surfing the internet or playing video games right up until we go to sleep. Netflix for example is designed to keep us hooked with their endless supply of content which ruthlessly starts to play the next video seconds after the credits start to roll on what you were watching.
It took me a long time to realise that perhaps still the best thing that we can do before going to sleep is to read a book. Many of us can relate to drifting off despite being engrossed in a good book and it’s partly due to how hard our eye muscles have to work when they are busy scanning the pages at night.
Personally, I like to read a non-fiction book with short chapters before I go to sleep such as Tim Ferris’s Tools of Titans so that I can always make it to the end of a chapter before my eyes eventually close.
3. How long you leave yourself on to charge every night.
Typically, it is recommended to get at least 7 hours of sleep each night but as individuals, the amount of sleep that we need can vary between us. It is also important to distinguish the difference between the time that you go to bed from the time that you actually fall asleep as these could be quite different in reality.
I have found that I do in-fact function best the next day after a solid 7-hour sleep. If I sleep for much more than this, it will often make me groggy the next morning. To find out how much sleep is best for you, start by ensuring that you have a 7-hour sleep and make a note of how you feel the following morning. Then you can add an extra 15 minutes to the following night’s sleep until you find the perfect amount for you.
When you start trying to wake up earlier for the first time, start by gradually waking up earlier as changing your alarm drastically from 7am to 5am will cause you nothing but pain. Set your alarm 5 minutes earlier each day until you get to your desired wakeup time. Changing your alarm gradually will help your body adjust and make your new wakeup time a lot more comfortable in the longer term.
4. Hate your alarm? Then you sure will hate waking up early.
Remember the phrase “Snooze you Lose”? Well it is true. Make sure that you have the snooze option turned off on your alarm as any extra sleep from snoozing will bring you no benefit. If you need more sleep after having a late night for example, just change your alarm for that morning to ensure that you give yourself the maximum time that you need for a high-quality sleep. Also, despite it being 2020 - having the alarm on the other side of the room so you physically have to get out of bed to turn it off, is still great advice.
Whatever ringtone you have for your alarm has a huge impact too. We all grow to hate the sound of our alarms and if we choose a song, then we can end up hating that song too. For me, using a smart speaker has completely solved this problem.
Currently, I am using a Sonos speaker which allows me to easily set a different playlist to play every day of the week. I even have the speaker set to stop playing half an hour before I leave for work to let me know that I need to start getting ready to leave.
5. Lighten your morning, brighten your day.
Lighting can make a huge difference to the quality of our sleep and reduce the strain of waking up. Waking up with natural light by leaving your curtains open is one way to wake up with a natural sunrise, but this is not always practical. Using an inexpensive “wake up light” that can simulate a sunrise is the next best thing as these can be set to start the “sunrise” 30 minutes before your alarm to help gently wake you up.
For the past few years, I have used a Phillips Wake Up Light which is controlled by a smart phone app. Through the app I can change the time of the sunrise for each day and can even change its colour. These “wake up lights” can also simulate a sunset which can help you to drift off to sleep each night too.
As one final piece of advice, try to get your room as dark as possible and if you have any electronic devices in your room that emit any light, simply stick a bit of black tape over them so that no light can shine through. Blackout curtains are also a great investment to ensure that you get the best quality sleep each and every night.
Final Thoughts
After spending the majority of my adult life trying to improve my own productivity, nothing has helped me be more productive each day than waking up early. In fact, my early starts are now the cornerstone of the lifestyle that I live today.
We all have goals and dreams however we never seem to prioritise the tasks that will help to get us there. Our lifestyle is a reflection of our priorities and by getting up even half an hour earlier, we can use that time to improve the areas of our lives that are most important to us. Remember the phrase “the early bird catches the worm”? Well, this one is true too.