This sleepy dog somewhat accurately represents a person barely woken up by a 6:00 AM alarm in winter. Except there wouldn’t be nearly as much light in real life. Sleepy | TCL8TO7

Winter is here. Our first snow has fallen, and I drive to work having to rely on my car’s headlights in the morning darkness and drive home having to rely on my car’s headlights in the utterly identical afternoon darkness.

For those of us who hinged our New Years’ Resolutions (or those who have Thanksgiving Resolutions – wow!) to the act of waking up early, we might have picked a bad season to do so. It’d be infinitely easier in the summer, where I could just throw the blinds open, hop into bed, and drift off to slumber knowing that Sunrise was at 5 and the light hitting my eyes would tell my body it was time to wake up.

However, just because it’s darker at a certain time in the day shouldn’t deter us from cultivating our early-rising habits. I, for one, get a strange sense of schadenfreude at myself in one of those rare moments where I wake up at 5 on a weekday. Wow, I’ve managed to write for 1,000 words, cleared all of my emails from the day before, finished one deliverable, and it’s barely 8:30 AM. That former me who woke up at 8 and almost missed his meeting? What an idiot. I’m not sure how healthy this line of thought is, but it does make getting out of bed in the morning easier.

I’m a strong believer in the school of thought that given the same conditions, we are more productive in the morning than at night. I haven’t been able to find scholastic literature backing up what I just wrote, but for me, night time is video game time. It’s an time to escape all the work I’ve done during the day and not think about the things I have to do in the near future.

Conversely, if I’d just woken up, my mind is relatively empty of random thoughts dropping by and it becomes a lot easier to focus on a task.

HOWEVER! We’re getting ahead of ourselves. This post is about how to get the habit of waking up early started, not for me to go on a self-congratulatory trip. So here’s the secret as far as I can tell:

To make waking up early in the morning a habit, reduce your mental preparation for waking up early in the morning.

So what does this mean? We split it into two main sections:

• (Falling Asleep) If you’re sleeping at your normal time, make waking up at 5 AM (Or some other desired hour/minute) your #1 Priority. Do everything you can to ensure that you’re falling asleep at around 10. If you had something come up and you had to fall asleep at 11 or 11:30, you are still committed to waking up at the exact same time the next day.
  • However, an inflexible plan is a bad plan.
  • So if you for some reason pulled a half-nighter or all-nighter at had to go to bed at 2. Give your self a break and sleep in because you deserve your adequate rest!
  • If you happened to play Rocket League until 4 in the morning and feel terribly guilty about it. Go ahead and acknowledge it, get some decent rest and start your streak anew the next day without dwelling on it too much. Guilt in the self-improvement department has never done anybody any good, ever. However, maybe do consider deleting Steam if you find it to be a constant source of late-night dillydallying.
• (Waking Up) Do something you LIKE to do instead of something you SHOULD do after waking up early.
  • So take the Rocket League example – if you go to sleep at 11 and wake up at the desired hour of 5 AM and proceed to play 3 hours of Rocket League – no worries!
  • Because the habit we’re trying to develop here is waking up in the morning, not doing XYZ in the morning.
  • I used to dread jumping right into homework and wading in the things that I was supposed to do right after waking up, and as a consequence I failed a lot at being an early riser. Then I switched to not judging myself for doing things like watching Netflix, browsing Reddit, or playing Final Fantasy after waking up.
  • After about three weeks, games and social media gradually stopped being a crutch for me as the habit of waking up early at a regular time became more concrete and more of a habit for me.

And for those of you who don’t have a need of waking up before sunrise…you don’t know how good you have it! Get your 8 hours of sleep in while you can.