Here are five tips that can help you rise and shine earlier, easier:
- Choose to get up before you go to sleep. You’re not very good at making decisions when you’ve just woken up. This is not the time to be making decisions about whether or not you should stay in bed! If you want to be a consistently early riser, try making your decision to rise at a specific time before you go to sleep the night before.
- Have a plan for your extra time. Let’s say you’ve actually made it out of bed 2 hours before you normally would. If you don’t have something planned to do with your extra time, you risk falling for the temptation of a “morning nap” that wipes out all the work you put into getting up.
- Make rising early a social activity. Wouldn’t it be great to join an early breakfast club, running group, or play chess in the park at 5 AM?
- Don’t use an alarm that makes you angry. If we’re all wired differently, why do we all insist on torturing ourselves with the same sort of alarm each morning? Experiment a bit and see what works best for you. Light, sound, smells, temperature, or even some contraption that dumps water on you might be more pleasant than your old alarm clock.
- Get your blood flowing right after waking. It doesn’t take much to get your blood flowing and chase the sleep from your head. Just pick something you don’t mind doing and go through the motions until your heart rate is up. Jumping rope, push-ups, crunches, or a few minutes of yoga are typically enough to do the trick.
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