Waking Successfully in the Early Morning

The association between waking in the early morning and having a successful day are unmistakable. So, if you want to be successful, you've got to get up early in the morning. But if you're like me, you probably think you just can't do it. Because of my dislike for waking early, I learned that there is a right and a wrong way to train oneself to wake in the morning.

The most instinctive method to waking early is deciding to go to sleep sooner and just adjusting your schedule so it allows you to sleep the same amount of hours you find yourself needing now. Sounds simple, but it doesn't work.

Going to bed too early is a bad idea. If it takes you longer than five minutes to get to sleep, you're going to bed too early. If you go to bed and get up based upon instinct, you're probably getting too much sleep. I've found that the time you rise, early in the morning, is the key.

The best option, to me, is to go to bed when you're sleepy, but get up at the same time every day. You see, your sleep needs are different day to day, but your body needs to adjust to a certain time of waking every morning. So you should get up early, every day even if your total sleep for the night varies.

You'll find this is successful even if you have to force yourself to stay awake. Reading is one of the best things you can do in this sort of "In between time" when you're just not quite ready for bed

Also, get out of bed as soon as the alarm goes off. Jump up and get to your business like a fireman responding to the alarm. If you linger, it becomes too easy to drift back to sleep. Then, you find that you're not rising at the designated time every morning and your body is struggling with readjustment all over again. Remember, key to becoming an early morning riser is when you wake, not when you go to bed.

I know this is probably not what you've been told. You've been told to get a certain number of hours each night, between prearranged times. My method is simply a combination of the two most prescribed. One, that we just mentioned, says go to sleep at a particular time and get up at a particular time. The other suggests that you allow your body to tell you when to settle for the night and when to wake. If you think about this, or try them both like I did, you'll find something lacking and you're just back to fighting getting up when the alarm goes off.

So, tonight, don't go to bed until you're tired. However, when you do go to bed, set the alarm early. You won't like me tomorrow morning, I guarantee. Just give it two weeks of going to sleep when you're tired and waking early morning with the alarm. I think your body will settle into a natural rhythm that will allow you to become an early morning riser no matter how unlikely it seems.