I've been getting up at 6:45 for a couple of weeks to go to the gym before work. The gym opens at 7:30, so I have just enough time to do some sport and get to work at 9.
I'm lucky that work and the gym are practically a 10-minute drive away. For several years I have done sports in the afternoon, after leaving work. However, although this year I have become a student, my days continue to have 24 hours and I prefer to use the afternoons to study, do some activity related to home or even meet a friend for a beer.
Obviously if I want to continue doing sports I have to get those hours from somewhere and the best place to do it is very early in the morning. However, getting up early is not an easy task, at least I love to sleep. Getting up 1 hour earlier than normal with how good it is in bed in winter, requires great willpower.
Here is the translation of one of Steve Pavlina's most popular posts. It has helped me personally a lot to get up early. Perhaps now that the cold begins you can put into practice some of the necessary techniques to get up early. I hope you like it.
Are early risers born or made? In my case, I definitely did. When I was 20 years old, I never went to bed before 12 at night, as a consequence I woke up very late and could not catch the rhythm of the day until mid-afternoon.
However, after a while I could no longer ignore the correlation between getting up early and success. Sometimes he made a great effort and managed to get up early. In doing so he discovered that my productivity increased, not just in the morning, but it remained constant throughout the day. Also, a pleasant feeling of well-being flooded me.
I have always been a proactive person and at that point I made a firm decision to become a regular early riser immediately. Without wasting any more time, I set the alarm to go off at 5 in the morning ... and woke up again at 12.
I tried it again many more times each morning without getting great results. I came to think that maybe I was born without the early-morning gene. As soon as the alarm clock started to ring, the first thing I did was turn it off and go back to sleep.
Several years passed in which I had practically zero progress in my new attempts to get up early. Then one day I decided to do a little more research on the subject and I discovered that I was approaching the problem in the wrong way and for that reason the results were not coming. It is very difficult to become a regular early riser using the wrong strategy, however with the correct strategy it is very simple.
The most widespread erroneous strategy is the following: You assume that if you want to get up early you will have to go to bed earlier. Then you calculate how many hours of sleep you get each night and adapt them to your new schedule. If you went to bed at 12 and got up at 8 (8 hours of sleep), now you will have to go to bed at 10 to get up at 6. Sounds pretty logical right? However this strategy almost always fails.
There are two streams of thought related to sleep patterns. The first one holds that you have to go to bed and get up at the same time each day. A priori this thought seems quite practical for modern societies in which we need predictable schedules that guarantee us rest..
The second stream holds that you should listen to the needs of your body and lie down when you are tired and not get up until you naturally wake up. This current is based on biology. Our bodies know how much rest we need, therefore we must listen to them.
Through trial / error method I found out that both streams are wrong if what you are looking for is to become a more productive person. Here's why:
If you always sleep X number of hours, many times you will go to bed without having enough sleep. If it takes you more than 5 minutes to fall asleep each night, that means you are not getting enough sleep. You're wasting time lying in bed without sleeping. Another problem is assuming that you need the same hours of sleep each night. This is false. Your sleep needs vary from day to day.
If you sleep based on what your body dictates, you are probably getting more sleep than you need (from 10 to 15 hours a week - the equivalent of a whole day). Also, your mornings will be less predictable when you wake up at different times each day, not to mention the work problems that would arise..
The optimal solution for me has been combine the two streams. It is something very simple. Many regular early risers do it even without being aware of it. However for me it meant breaking a very resistant mental barrier. The solution is to go to bed when I'm sleepy (and only when I'm sleepy) and always set the alarm at a set time (7 days a week). Therefore I always get up at the same time (at 6 in my case) but I go to bed at different times every night.
I go to bed only when I am too sleepy to be up. If I can't read more than 1 or 2 pages of a book without closing my eyes, it's time to sleep. Most of the time I go to bed, I fall asleep within 3 minutes. I lie down, make myself comfortable and fall asleep right away.
Sometimes I go to bed at 9:30, other times I stay up until 12. Although most of the time it is usually between 10 and 11. If I'm not sleepy, I stay up until my eyes can't stand more. Reading is an excellent activity to invest these moments since it becomes very obvious when you are too tired to continue reading..
When my alarm goes off every morning I turn it off, stretch for a couple of seconds and automatically get up. I don't think about it. With practice I have learned that the longer it takes to get up, the more likely it is that I will fall asleep again. Therefore I do not allow myself to have internal conversations with myself about the benefits of going back to sleep after turning off the alarm clock..
After several days using this approach I discovered that my sleep patterns oscillated with their own natural rhythm. If I slept little one day, I would automatically fall asleep earlier and therefore get more sleep the next day. If, on the other hand, I had energy to spare, I would sleep less. My body knew the opportune moment to knock me out because it knew perfectly well that the next day I would always get up at the same time, and that time was not negotiable.
With this approach, I was getting an average of 90 minutes less sleep each night, yet I felt much more rested than before. I slept almost 100% of the time I was in bed.
I have read that many people with insomnia go to bed when they are not sleepy. If you're not sleepy and have trouble falling asleep quickly, get up and stay awake for a while. Resist sleep until your body begins to release the hormones that steal consciousness..
If you go to bed when you are sleepy enough and always get up at the same time, you will cure your insomnia. The first night you will be up late but you will end up falling asleep. Possibly the next day you feel more tired than normal after having slept a few hours and also having got up early. However, the day will pass and as you feel more tired you will go to bed earlier the second night. After several days following this dynamic, you will end up establishing your own sleep pattern.
So, if you want to become a regular early riser (or just have more control over your sleeping patterns), then try this: Go to bed only when you are too sleepy to stay awake and get up at the same time each morning.
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