How to Wake Up Early When You Don't Really Want To

Waking up in the morning can be difficult. Especially if you have problems getting to sleep, or if you need to get up especially early on a specific day.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• A good bed.
• A good alarm clock.
• Hopefully, a helpful spouse.
• Some willpower.

1. Go to bed at a reasonable time the night before. Try to go to bed at least 9 hours before the time you need to wake up.

2. Don't be tempted to stay up late watching TV or browsing the Internet. You can goof off at work the next day if you need to.

3. If you have extreme trouble getting to sleep, talk to your doctor. Sometimes taking a little Benadryl 30-60 minutes before bed helps.

4. Use an alarm with two settings. Set the first alarm to go off 15-30 minutes before the time you need to get up. Set this alarm to the radio, so you are gradually brought out of sleep when it goes off.

5. Set the second alarm to go off when you need to get up, and this one should be the annoying screeching sound that most alarm clocks have.

6. Immediately go take a very hot shower to help raise your body tempurature and wake up.

7. Get ready to go - don't get back in bed!

Tips & Warnings

• If you tend to turn off the alarm and go back to sleep, then put the alarm on the other side of the room so you have to get out of bed to turn it off.
• Tell your spouse or whoever is helping you to make sure you get up at the right time.
• Any other method besides the radio alarm to slowly wake you up will work. If you can rig lights to gradually turn on or something, that will work to. What we are trying to do is wake up during the correct portion of the sleep cycle, when the body wants to wake up.
• Even though it feels sooo goood to sleep in, it's not worth it if you sleep in and come in late to work if it's going to get you fired.

[celestine]

on 8/18/2009 Thanks a lot for the tips - these are effective! Waking early is one of my interest areas - in fact, I covered on this topic in quite a far bit of detail in my blog:

21 Tips to Wake Up Early: http://celestinechua.com/blog/2009/01/21-tips-to-wake-up-early/
Why I decided to cultivate the habit of waking up early: http://celestinechua.com/blog/2009/08/why-i-wake-up-early-and-9-reasons-you-should-do-so-too/

[raneesh]

on 10/16/2008 great

[jimdris]

on 12/20/2007 Years ago I was lax in getting to work on time because I'd turn off my alarm in my sleep. I was in the military and had to do something drastic, so I plugged my canister vacuum cleaner into a 24 hour timer. The jet plane that took off in my bedroom the next few mornings got me up alright!