http://celestinechua.com/blog/2009/01/21-tips-to-wake-up-early/Waking up early has always seemed like such a monumental task to me. There are really two folds to this task – 1) Awaking from your sleep 2) Staying awake. Below is a list of 21 tips you can use to wake up early AND stay up : 1. Understand your reason for wanting to wake up early. What is it? Is it to have time to do your personal activities? To get more work done? To get a head start in your day? 2. Make a personal commitment to yourself to achieve this goal. If you have made the decision to wake up early, then be accountable and live up to it. 3. Create a reward for accomplishing this goal. It should be enticing enough to motivate you throughout the whole process. 4. Plaster your goal prominently everywhere: on your noticeboard, your notebook, your vision board (if you have one), your wallpaper, etc. Spell out clearly the time you want to wake up and make it big and bold. 5. Be accountable to others. Share your goal with friends/family/acquaintances/strangers. 6. Cut out the stimulants that affect your sleep schedule, namely caffeine (coffee, tea, coke/soda) and alcohol. These messes around with your sleep and quality of your sleep, which subsequently affects your waking time. 7. Make a transition. Instead of waking immediately at XXam, improve your waking time by 15~30min every day until you reach your goal. 8. Plan a non-negotiable agenda for the next day. This agenda should starting right from the point you are supposed to wake up right till your day ends. It should be so compact that you have to wake up on time to finish everything planned. 9. Create urgency # 1. Set up extremely important and urgent tasks as the first items of the day so you have to wake up and finish them. 10. Create urgency # 2. Fix an appointment with someone early in the morning; it should be with someone you cannot cancel on or there will be dire consequences. 11. Get a morning call service. Some services are: iPing and Wake Up Land. Or you can ask someone who will be awake then to call you. 12. Sleep earlier. This one is probably the single most important tip out of the whole list. Let’s be realistic – if you target to wake up at 5am, don’t turn in at only 1am or 2am the night before expecting to be successful in waking up on time. You already setting yourself an uphill challenge! When I do sleep early and ensure I have sufficient sleep, waking up early / when the alarm rings becomes a very easy, natural task. 13. Set your alarm clock. Goes without saying! After you get into a regular sleeping schedule, you will likely find yourself waking up automatically at around the same time every day without need for an alarm clock. 14. Set multiple alarm clocks (3-5) at the same or different times (5 minutes apart from each other). This is for the heavy sleepers; I’m quite a light sleeper so just one alarm clock does the trick. Multiple alarm clocks tend to backfire on me – having all the ringing makes me feel disrupted instead and the first instinct while I’m in a semi-conscious state will be to return to sleep where it’s nice and quiet. 15. Put your alarm clock(s) really far from you (but still audible) such that you need to get off your bed to reach it. 16. Switch your alarm to your favorite music/mp3 (most handphones today have this function). By the time the music finishes playing, you will be more awake and ready to get up. I haven’t tried this before since my handphone does not have the function but it does seem like it will be an effective method. 17. Before you sleep, hold in your mind the time you intend to wake up all the way until you fall asleep. When I wake, I usually find that this intent flies into my mind as the first thought and it helps drive me to wake up. 18. Set your alarm clock 15 minutes earlier than your designated time. When it rings, put it on snooze, and spend the next 15 minutes mentally preparing yourself so you can get up voluntarily once the alarm rings again. I find this works quite well for me 19. Get out of the bed immediately once you hear the alarm. You all know how it feels in the morning when you wake up – the voice in your head is just coaxing you to go to sleep every morning despite your best intents to want to wake up. Instead of giving it the chance to speak, immediately get your physical body out of the bed and walk out! Once you last the first 5 minutes, you will find that sleepiness wears off very quickly and the day actually moves ahead as your other days. 20. Establish it as a daily habit. Making it a daily habit will be easier to maintain than if it’s only 5 days a week. If you keep having to balance around different timing schedules on weekdays and weekends, your body clock has to constantly adjust and it makes your task much harder. 21. Load up a full combination of the tips above for your complete arsenal to blast this goal wide open!
