I definitely was not born an early riser. About 2-3 years ago you would probably have to drag me out of bed for school. Most weekends I would stay up late and sleep until noon.
Since then, I have gone through my own self-improvement transition, which you could probably just call maturity, but nowadays a lot of the kids my age seem to have de-aged somehow, so call it what you want. Either way, I began my own research.
I wanted to know how you could be more productive during the day (which, believe it or not, brought me to the creation of this website) and I had come across the idea of becoming an early riser. It makes total sense: waking up early = more time in the day to be productive.
Although it wasn’t an easy process, I began to train myself to wake up earlier (without feeling miserable). So far, I have found a series of benefits to an early-rising lifestyle:
- Gives you precious quiet time before the day “really starts” and before everyone in your household wakes from their caves
- It actually compresses the amount of time you need to sleep for, reducing how early you need to go to bed
- Provides a fulfilling sense of accomplishment that refreshes every single morning that you are productive
- This kind of feeling can initiate some motivation to keep doing what you’re doing
Through my experience and experimentation, I have broken up this process into a 5 part acronym: CLASS.
C – Consistency
The first step in becoming an early riser is to create a daily habit. Now, I don’t believe you should be waking up at a fixed time for the rest of your life and never varying it, life is just too volatile for that for that to work. However, I would spend some effort setting up a base time. A base time acts as a flexible guideline in which you would naturally wake up if there were no interruptions.
A base time is formed through the creation of a daily habit. Commit to 30-60 days of waking up at a specific time. After 30-60 days, you can now have more flexibility when waking up while still returning to that early base time with less effort.
My current base time for the summer is 7:30 am and since it has become natural, I can occasionally wake up at 8:30 while still returning to my base time with ease.
L – Lightss
Yes the extra “S” is intentional. It’s to remind you that extra lights are better than simply turning on one light and calling it a job done. Don’t go skyrocketing your energy bill with it, but turn on enough light to keep you up.
Your brain has a natural ability to translate light into wakefulness. Extra illumination tricks the brain into thinking it’s later in the day and, therefore, it is time to wake up. The next step after you silence your alarm should be to hit the lights.
Blue light (light that emits from digital screens such as your phone or laptop) also effectively releases melanopsin, which is an effective suppressor of melatonin, the chemical that makes you sleepy. So bonus points for anyone who works with a screen in the morning!
A – Action
One of the most effective ways to force yourself up in the morning is to push necessary work into the early hours, so you have to wake up. When you set your alarm for 7 am, but there’s nothing to do until 9 am, you’re gonna have no reason to wake up and, therefore, no will or motivation.
Here are a few things you can do earlier in your day to make waking up more meaningful:
- Workout – From personal experience, knocking out any workout early in the morning (even if it’s just jogging) is extremely fulfilling and will definitely wake you up for the rest of the day.
- Simple tasks – Household chores, reading, or even a little homework (even though I’m not an advocate of procrastination) can easily get pushed back before work, school, or anything else during the day.
- Video games – Although not busy work, if you really have nothing to do in the day, video games can be a huge motivator, especially for the younger generation.
S – Speed
One quick tip when reducing snooze abuse is to be FAST. Everyone knows that the most effective and painless way to take off a bandaid is to quickly rip it off. I believe the same goes for getting out of bed.
A lot of us, including me, tend to debate occasionally whether or not we should get out of bed (even though we know we have to) and avoid the pain by hitting the snooze button again and again. Although it feels better now, it only makes things worse and more miserable in the end.
When you hear your alarm, try and jump out of bed as soon as possible before you have a chance to talk yourself back to sleep.
S – Steady
Making the jump from waking up at noon to waking up at 6 in the morning overnight is pretty daring and most likely a failure.
Although there isn’t a fancy scientific physical limitation that prevents you from achieving this, if you’re reading this article you most likely aren’t capable of sustaining this quick jump in the long run.
Instead, we can make small, but gradual adjustments to make steady progress.