I Became An Early Morning Person, and You Can Too
Some of my earliest (…) memories are of getting up at 5am and having nothing to do. In order to avoid my parents' wrath for waking them up too early, I would turn on the TV. Video games could take up to 30 minutes to load on my ZX Spectrum, so gaming in the early morning wasn’t a first choice.
But in the mid-1980s there wasn’t much to watch on TV that early, or at least there wasn’t much to watch where I grew up. So I would watch Open University lecture recordings that had been made in the early 1970s on a range of subjects — including maths, astrophysics, computer sci and civil engineering — typically delivered by a guy in brown nylon flares, an orange kipper tie or with a crazy wild beard. These programmes were meant to be recorded on a video recorder with a timer function, to be watched at a later time by students following a distance learning degree course. The hoi polloi were expected to be in bed still.
But that time of early rising, university lecture watching, rise-and-shine morning vitality proved to be a short-lived phase, to the great relief of my parents. The transition to adolescence seemed to tilt my body clock’s internal waking function closer towards noon than to the 5am shift, and it stayed that way for many years. The struggle to get to work on time was real.
The benefits of early rising are widely known, so I will just restate some personal faves here. Getting more done. Not being in a rush. No more showing up late for work and meetings. Having more personal time free of work and family obligations that you can invest in your health and personal development — that’s more time to exercise, more time to read, more time to meditate, more time to clean up the house. Etcetera.
It’s easy to objectively look at all of the incentives and benefits to getting up before dawn, and say “oh yes, I want a bit of that.” But in the snug of morning, warm beneath the blankets, the allure of a long snooze can be very hard to resist, or at least, that was my experience of it. But with a bit of effort and persistence, I was able to change all that.
So without further ado, these are the hacks that I used to move my clock around. If I could do it, then I promise, so can you.
Stop drinking alcohol.
I repeat, stop drinking alcohol. Just stop that. Not only are you harming your liver, your waistline, your social life and perhaps also your relationships, you’re also wrecking your sleep. Reputable research paper after reputable research paper has demonstrated that even light alcohol consumption causes your sleep quality to plummet, leaving you tired, grumpy and unable to get out of bed. I’m just going to assume that you don’t smoke.
Get 8 hours of sleep.
If you want to get up at 5am every day in a repeatable, sustainable way, then you cannot expect to run on 4 or 5 hours of sleep. It’s just not fair on your body and your mind, and the sleep deficit that you will incur might drive you towards an elevated risk of dementia, whilst also making your 5am start a one off, not-to-be-repeated event — rather than the stable routine that you’re wanting to build.
Exercise,
Getting up early means having slept well the night before. My experience is that sustained, intense, aerobic and anaerobic exercise (like running, plyometrics, HIIT, or similar) will get your daytime energy levels soaring whilst greatly improving the quality of your Zs, meaning you get a great night’s sleep and you don’t lethargically hit the snooze button when its time to rise.
Check your breathing…
It turns out, that I had suffered from chronic sinusitis for many years, without being fully aware of it. This was bunging up my nose on a permanent basis, which meant I frequently suffered from sleep apnea, and my wife also got to enjoy a serenade of snoring every night. After minor keyhole surgery to my sinuses and a half day in hospital, my breathing, and consequently my sleep quality, was massively improved. It also meant greater all-round energy levels. It could be that you’re suffering something similar (tip: chronic sinusitis gets progressively worse with age). If I have made you wonder if this might also apply to you, then I recommend that you ask to be referred to a specialist clinician for a thorough check of your nose and sinuses.
Consider daily intermittent fasting,
It perhaps goes without saying, but getting out of bed is better motivated when you’re hungry. So my advice here is to stop eating one or two hours before you go to bed. By the early morning, you’ll be getting a growly tum, which will make you extra primed and ready to spring up out of bed, wash face, brush teeth and demolish a delicious bowl of fruit porridge.
Build a morning ritual —
If you want to get up early in a regular and consistent way, then you will need to build a routine. Routines form into subliminal habits quite quickly, meaning that after a while, you won’t need to think about it anymore. You’ll simply get up and out of bed, and run through your morning routine before you’re even fully awake. My advice for a morning routine:
- Go to the loo
- Wash your hands
- Get on the scales
- Wash your face and brush your hair
- Brush your teeth
- Take your t-shirt off (weird sounding I know, but it’ll make you cold, which will make you more awake)
- Apply deo, creams, scents etc.
- Feed cats, dogs or whatever
- Go and make yourself a coffee
You should be fully awake by now 🙂
Choose your alarm clock wisely.
There are so many alarm clocks to choose from out there. I have tested many during my lifetime. Mechanical tickers with bells on top, clock radio alarms, loud buzzers with LED displays, smartphones, daylight simulators…all the toys. But none of them really worked. I would either flip the snooze, or I would just turn the alarm off altogether and go back to sleep.
My grandmother went deaf quite early in her life, and it was remembering that she used an alarm clock that you had to stuff in a pillow, which would shake the pillow when it was time to rise, that got me thinking. After some hunting online, I settled on a €15 Chinese generic smartwatch that has a vibrating alarm function. It’s pretty ugly, but it works, and the battery lasts for weeks before it needs recharging. I set three daily alarms, spaced a minute apart — one at 05.30, one at 05.31, and one at 05.32. If I’m not up and out of bed by 05.31, I’m always up before 05.32.
Bonus points: because it’s a gently vibrating wrist band, it’s probably not going to wake up your partner and trigger any arguments about early morning noise.
So that’s my stepwise plan to shifting your sleep cycles around. I’m confident that you too can become an early riser. Yes, if you follow the suggestions above, then I think you will have a much higher chance of successfully hacking your biorhythms, so that you gain the unique advantages of being up before dawn.
What will you do with all that extra time that you’ll gain?
