I am so not a morning person, despite how much I try to be. At night, I decide that tomorrow, I'm going to wake up early and start being productive, but when the next morning comes around, I keep hitting the snooze button. Sometimes I hit the snooze for as long as two hours. There is always a little voice inside my head saying "Don't get up now. Sleep a little longer. It's too early to be getting up." When I am laying in a nice, warm bed early in the morning, the voice makes perfect sense, and I usually listen to it. Then two hours later, I am mad with myself because I've wasted valuable time. I decided that there has to be a better way, so I started searching the internet.
What I found out was trying to use willpower to get yourself out of bed in the morning is a losing battle. It might work once in a while, but most of the time, you won't be thinking straight when you first wake up in the morning. The decisions you make when you are half awake and halfway in dreamland are not the decisions you normally make when you are fully awake. So what is the solution? The solution is to train yourself so that you no longer have to think. To get yourself to a point that when you hear the alarm, you automatically get out of bed. Instead of relying on your conscious mind to get you out of bed, let your subconscious mind take care of this problem.
In order to do this, you have to do it the same way you learned any repeatable skill, and that's with practice. You have to practice getting up as soon as you hear the alarm go off. The goal is to practice enough until your subconscious takes over, and starts getting you out of bed automatically. You aren't going to practice in the morning, but instead during the day when you are full awake. Make the room dark, lay in bed, and set your alarm a couple of minutes ahead. Get in your favorite sleep position and close your eyes. Pretend you are actually asleep.
When the alarm goes off, try to turn it off as fast as you can. Take a deep breath, stretch out your limbs, sit up, and plant your feet on the floor. Then proceed to do the actions you usually do after you normally wake up in the morning. Then return to bed, and repeat. The goal is to keep doing it until it becomes automatic, and you no longer have to think. With enough practice, you will condition a new physiological response to the sound of the alarm. Eventually, it will be uncomfortable not to get up when the alarm goes off. The more you practice your wake-up ritual, the deeper ingrained it will become.
When you reach the point where this becomes a daily habit, you won't have to practice daytime anymore. You only have to condition yourself once, you are good for life. This is one of the most productive habits you can establish. If you add just 60 minutes to each day, you will have added 9 40-hour weeks to your year, and imagine what you can do with all that extra time!
What I found out was trying to use willpower to get yourself out of bed in the morning is a losing battle. It might work once in a while, but most of the time, you won't be thinking straight when you first wake up in the morning. The decisions you make when you are half awake and halfway in dreamland are not the decisions you normally make when you are fully awake. So what is the solution? The solution is to train yourself so that you no longer have to think. To get yourself to a point that when you hear the alarm, you automatically get out of bed. Instead of relying on your conscious mind to get you out of bed, let your subconscious mind take care of this problem.
In order to do this, you have to do it the same way you learned any repeatable skill, and that's with practice. You have to practice getting up as soon as you hear the alarm go off. The goal is to practice enough until your subconscious takes over, and starts getting you out of bed automatically. You aren't going to practice in the morning, but instead during the day when you are full awake. Make the room dark, lay in bed, and set your alarm a couple of minutes ahead. Get in your favorite sleep position and close your eyes. Pretend you are actually asleep.
When the alarm goes off, try to turn it off as fast as you can. Take a deep breath, stretch out your limbs, sit up, and plant your feet on the floor. Then proceed to do the actions you usually do after you normally wake up in the morning. Then return to bed, and repeat. The goal is to keep doing it until it becomes automatic, and you no longer have to think. With enough practice, you will condition a new physiological response to the sound of the alarm. Eventually, it will be uncomfortable not to get up when the alarm goes off. The more you practice your wake-up ritual, the deeper ingrained it will become.
When you reach the point where this becomes a daily habit, you won't have to practice daytime anymore. You only have to condition yourself once, you are good for life. This is one of the most productive habits you can establish. If you add just 60 minutes to each day, you will have added 9 40-hour weeks to your year, and imagine what you can do with all that extra time!
