Waking up early is a struggle to most of us. Legends say that some people wake up early and with ease in the morning. I refused to acknowledge that for the longest time too. What is more incredible, some people aren’t grumpy and exhausted from not sleeping well. There are ways you could learn how to wake up earlier and become that person!
Most of us would give a lot to be able to wake up early and not struggle through an intense urge to get back to bed hours after that. Fortunately, that’s possible.
It may not be easy to change your lifestyle if you’re a night-owl. But there are a few steps that will stop you questioning how to wake up early and if that’s possible at all, and gradually ease you into waking up in the early morning hours.
Table of Contents
How to Wake up Easier?
To tackle the “how to wake yourself up” problem, you have to be willing to change some parts of your daily routine and also your attitude towards sleep. So, here are the required steps:
- Good bedtime routines
- Avoid screens
- Take care of your sleeping pattern
- Plan your sleep stages
- Get quality sleep
- Get natural light
- Have a pleasant morning ritual
- Motivate yourself
- Take it gradually
Let's look into each of them.
Bedtime Routine
If you want to know how to wake up in the morning, you have to realize that waking up in the morning starts with going to sleep the night before. If it takes you forever to fall asleep, you might not get enough sleep to wake up at the hour you want. So you have to go to bed ready for sleep. There are also things you need to avoid before bedtime.
One of them is caffeine. It’s a stimulant made for keeping you awake. While most of us are sensible enough not to drink coffee as a bedtime drink, remember that most teas have just as much caffeine. Opt for natural relaxing herbal teas in the evening to eliminate the caffeine intake.
Another one is stress. Stress has the opposite effect of what you want to achieve: it triggers your body and gets you ready for action. Try to not think about things or have conversations that stress you out at least an hour before bed. Instead, do something you enjoy to unwind. Practice a hobby or read a book.
Learning to fall asleep easier could save you a lot of headaches when it comes to waking up as you’d feel so much more rested. If you can’t fall asleep quickly enough for your liking, look into what’s keeping you up and try to find ways to solve the problems.
Avoid Screens Before Sleeping
It’s incredibly tempting to lie in bed and aimlessly scroll through all of your social media just before sleep. And that doesn’t help with understanding how to wake up early in the morning. Winding down with your phone or tablet might sound reasonable as it’s the time of the day when you finally get enough downtime to relax and catch up on what happened during the day.
Screens aren’t your friends if you want to fall asleep anytime soon. For one, the moving images and sudden sounds distract you and prevent your body from relaxing. Such dynamic sights have the opposite effect of what you’re trying to achieve just before bed. It certainly won’t help you solve the problem of how to wake up in the morning.
Furthermore, they emit artificial blue light, that prevents melatonin, the natural sleeping hormone, from releasing. Delaying melatonin release results in delayed sleepiness and disrupted sleep. Not getting enough sleep leads to difficulties in waking up.
Take Care of Your Sleeping Pattern
To solve the problem of how to wake up easier, your body needs to know when to prepare for that. For that, you need a bed-time and waking up routine. Develop a sleeping pattern that you’ll be able to stick to. Keep in mind that you need to get enough sleep (7-9 hours for adults) and don’t sacrifice that for waking up earlier.
Planning that out is easier than actually doing that. Weekends might be the most challenging. Ideally, you’d stick to it during weekends too, but some might not be able to do it due to social outings. At least try to not drift too far from the hour range. Making up for lost sleep by sleeping till noon isn’t the best option here as it distorts your sleeping pattern.
Ideally, you could get your friends interested in how to wake up earlier too. Recommend them to look into its benefits or try motivating them by giving them your own reasoning. This way, you all will be in the same boat when it comes to socialization timing, and they won’t distract you from getting your daily sleep at reasonable hours.
Plan your Sleep Stages
If you want to know how to wake up early, and you haven’t heard about sleep cycles, you should look into them. There are four stages of the cycle. Each of them lasts from 90 to 120 minutes. If you wake up in the deepest state (the 3rd one, just before REM - rapid eye movement stage), you’ll be the most grumpy. And we don’t want that.
Try to wake up at the end of your sleep cycle instead of the middle of it. Being woken up suddenly from a deep state of sleep might make you feel even more tired than you did when you went to sleep. It might sound complicated if it’s the first time you hear about the sleep cycle, but it’s possible to calculate it.
You should try to, at least approximately, calculate when’s the best time to wake up based on your sleep cycle. Keep in mind that one cycle lasts from 90 to 120 minutes and add up based on how much sleep you’re planning to get. You can use and online sleep cycle calculator for that.
Furthermore, there are various apps that track your sleep cycle. They base it on your movements, the time you fall asleep, and the usual statistics. This way get pretty accurate results.
Get Quality Sleep
Despite the fact that all of us spend a third of our lives sleeping, most of us don’t know much about how we fall asleep, what influences sleep, and even how to wake up in the morning feeling well-rested.
Sleep is a vast subject as so many factors influence our sleep, and it’s pretty much impossible to fit it all in a few sentences. But what really matters is overall health, sleeping environment, your bed, and your pillow.
Make sure to take care of your health to avoid illnesses and all the possible harmful effects those illnesses could have on your sleep. Try to make your sleeping environment suitable for sleep. See if it’s cool enough for comfort, tidy and comfortable.
Although when it comes to comfort, what matters most is your mattress. Choosing the right one is a hard task that should be taken seriously. If your sleep quality is lacking, one of the first things you should do is try to see if your mattress is still good to use and if it’s suitable for your body type, preferences, and sleeping position.
If you notice that your current mattress fails to meet some of the criteria, you’d better get a new one. Buying a quality mattress can save you a lot of headaches (or in this case, backaches). Look into some of the best mattresses out there and choose the one that suits your needs best to improve the quality of your sleep.
Get Natural Light
As you’ve learned, light prevents melatonin from releasing, and melatonin is what’s making you sleepy. That means that if you’re making yourself get up in the dark, you’re doing it the least natural way.
If it’s dark in your bedroom, you’ll naturally be less willing to get up and get going. Try to open your blinds to get some natural light, if possible. This will gradually wake you up as your body will react to the sun rising.
Some of us, usually in winter, have to wake up before the sunrise. In this case, it might be harder to trick your body into understanding that it’s time to get up. There are a few solutions to that. While usual home lights aren’t as effective as natural sunlight, they can help.
Although the best thing you can do is get lights that are made to resemble the daylight. They work almost as good as the sun. If possible, set them up so that they get lighter gradually this way mimicking the sun rising.
Have a Pleasant Morning Ritual
If you know that you’ll wake up and have to get straight to work, it might be a little discouraging. You have to make yourself want to get up and get going. Find things you would enjoy doing in the morning.
Your routine can be either relaxing or energizing. See what works best for you. Some people prefer to journal their thoughts or read a few pages of a book, while others prefer to go work out straight away. Both of them have their own benefits, the first one allows you to start your day calmly and enjoy the extra minutes of silence and the latter one makes you more energized.
It all depends on what works for you. These definitely aren’t the only choices. What matters is that you don’t just hit the snooze button and go back to sleep, failing your task to tackle the how to wake up in the morning challenge.
Motivate Yourself
So you completed all the steps. You think you’re ready for the glamorous early morning life. You might be, but you won’t be able to keep it up if you don’t know the purpose of it. What you have to do is understand the reasoning why you want that.
Some people do it because it’s the only time they can enjoy some peace and quiet, others cherish morning time because it’s their most productive hours. And others have some seemingly bizarre reasons watching a show the minute it airs while they live in entirely different time zone.
All you need is to realize what’s important to you about it and stick to it. Make it your first thought when you get up in the morning and actually do that.
Take It Gradually
You might really want to know how to wake up easier in the morning, and might be ready to jump straight into it. But the chances are that, if you’re a night owl, you’re used to snoozing until noon, and looking for solutions on how to wake yourself up at 5 am might not work instantly. You might be able to pull off waking up 4-5 hours earlier than usual once or twice, but it will most probably not work in the long run.
Start small, maybe even 5-15 minutes earlier each day. Your body won’t be as shocked as it would be merely choosing to wake up at dawn instead of your usual late morning. These few minutes add up, and you might not even notice how your routine had shifted from a night owl’s to an early bird’s.
What is more, you’re way more motivated that way. You get closer to your goal every day, and you can put a little checkmark every time you succeed in this task. Constant improvement is what will drive you in the long run.
Conclusions
We all value our sleep and some value sleeping in more than others. If you’re that person who believes that there’s no way you can just naturally be up in the early morning, unless you really have to, it might be a bit harder for you achieve that. But it’s not impossible.
If you’re looking how to wake up easier in the morning, there are a few steps to take. You start off by managing your bedtime routine, make sure to avoid screens before sleep, and plan your sleep so it’s both regular and your natural sleeping pattern isn’t disturbed by being forced to wake up halfway through your sleeping cycle.
Having done that, to achieve success in working on how to wake yourself up, you must make sure your sleep is high quality. That way, you’ll wake up feeling rested. And when you actually wake up, try to get some natural light if possible to get ready for your preferred morning routine.
And it all won’t matter if you don’t understand the reason why you wish to find answers to the question of how to wake up in the morning. You need a goal or a few smaller objectives to wish to wake up early every day. These are highly individual, and everyone might have different reasons for that, so make sure to find yours.
And now you’re ready to become the person you believed you couldn’t be if you’ve been struggling with waking up. Working on managing the "how to wake up earlier?" problem, make sure you’re not sacrificing your sleep quality. Sleep enough and sleep well. If you notice that you might not be getting good quality sleep, see if it might be time to change the mattress to be ready for waking up early and rested.