On Being an Early Riser

By Gaz under Personal Growth

I’ve posted a follow-up to this article explaining how after 6 weeks of practice I have optimised this method.

Until very recently, I’ve always been one of those people who went to bed in the small hours of the morning, and then struggled out of bed at 10 or 11am, and had to sink a strong black coffee to get myself going. With my last few jobs I was given the flexibility to work to my own schedule provided I was at work every day for at least a few hours that overlapped with everyone else. It was all too easy to keep telling myself, “I’m really good at being awake and being asleep, I just struggle to change between the two” — as I rolled in to work at lunch time again.

Last Summer I was finally able to quit my day job and make my living from writing, speaking and contract work, which means that I am now entirely responsible for my own schedule. Guess what? I would get up even later, telling myself that I didn’t have to commute anymore so I could spend that time in bed so that when I did eventually get up, I’d be past my morning bleariness. And of course getting up later would mean that I didn’t feel tired until 3 or 4 or even 7am.

It took me a few months to realise how ridiculous I had let things become and resolved to do something about it. I knew it was going to be difficult, as I had rarely woken up before 10am in the better part of 15 years. That was until about a month ago. Now, my alarm goes off at 7am, and I am sat at my desk ready to work by 8:30am each morning almost without fail. Here’s how I did it…

I found an article about How to Become an Early Riser on Steve Pavlina’s blog, which spurred me into trying some of his strategies. Steve is exactly right when he says: “The solution was to go to bed when I’m sleepy (and only when I’m sleepy) and get up with an alarm clock at a fixed time”. In his case 5am, but that is a little too much too soon for me — especially as, not too long ago, it was a time I often saw before I even got into bed.

1. Go to bed when you’re sleepy, but set the alarm for 7am regardless

I’m usually asleep by 12:30am, but this strategy allows me to stay up later when I need to, or go to bed early if I’ve had a tough day or if I didn’t get enough sleep the night before. It also means that my body clock is now trained to wake me at 7am. Unless I went to bed long after I should have done, I usually wake up 10 minutes or so before the alarm sounds.

Steve’s next tip is: “When my alarm goes off every morning, I turn it off, stretch for a couple seconds, and sit up. I don’t think about it. I’ve learned that the longer it takes me to get up, the more likely I am to try to sleep in”. Dead wrong for me. If I leap out of bed and try to make a running start to the day, it’s pretty much given that I’ll be grumpy and unproductive for the next few hours. On the other hand, the snooze button is fatal too, I’ve been through the torture of being woken every 15 minutes for 3 hours, promising myself I’ll get up on the next cycle. Instead, I’ll spend a 10 minutes or so planning what I’m going to do today, think about what I’d like for breakfast, and then get up when I start to feel more alert — usually around 7:15am.

2. Slowly reach waking alertness by planning the day ahead as soon as the alarm is off

Before I took control of my sleep patterns, I would spend most days playing catch up with all the things I should have done already, collapsing into bed exhausted and sleeping for 8 hours or more before reluctantly rising the next day to start all over again. There is a great positive feedback loop from getting up earlier: Now that I’m up consistently, I’ve found I’m sleeping for closer to 6 or 7 hours each night, and with that extra hour or two I can break out of catch-up-mode, which means I feel less stressed and exhausted come bed time. After only a few weeks of this, I have time to read at night, and that makes it easy for me to tell when I’m ready to fall asleep. As soon as I realise that I won’t make it through the next page, I put the book down and I’m asleep within minutes. As a matter of fact, in a follow-up article, Steve recommends staying awake until you are sleepy enough to fall asleep in less than 5 minutes. I agree whole-heartedly with this.

3. Reading is a great way to end the day

After several years of barely reading at all and being a slave to audible.com, I’m starting my fourth honest to goodness paperback book this month. This alone is almost worth the price of breaking the long standing habit of sleeping in every day.

One final tip I have is that it is important to follow the same routine every morning. I rely on having a mechanical list of well defined, repeatable tasks to tackle in the morning before I can get into the real work of the day. In my case, I shower, brush my teeth, get dressed, prepare breakfast, browse the morning paper and then by 8:30am I’m charged up and eager to start the day. At this early stage in my new found ability to get up at a sensible hour, I think the routine is important enough to follow every single day, weekends included.

4. Stick to a morning routine

For me, having a gentle start to the day, more time to structure each day productively, and a little time to read each night is motivation enough to keep this up, but if you’re wondering what to do with all the extra time, you could do a lot worse than starting at Bert Webb’s Open Loops blog.

Steve has another useful recommendation: break any addiction to caffeine you may have — I’ll second that, and I’ll explain why in a future post. After another month or so of the routine I’ve described here, I’m not sure yet whether I’ll try a 6am start, or maybe I’ll try to vary the schedule for work days and play days. If this doesn’t work for you, there are also some alternative strategies from another 5am riser for you to experiment with at lifehack.org. If you have had any successes, or failures, with radically altering your sleep patterns I’d love to hear about them in the comments…

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1. The Importance of Morning Routine
2. On Being An Early Riser: Progress Report
3. How To Avoid Jet Lag
4. How To Avoid Jet Lag - Part 2
5. How to Break Caffeine Addiction

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