How to Wake Up Early: Day 19, slipped up, 2 new tricks

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Can’t believe it’s been almost 3 weeks of dark starts!  And I’ve still got new tricks to try…

I’ve discovered something weird.  If I let myself sleep in after a late night, it isn’t the next morning that I have trouble getting up – it’s the one after!  That’s twice now I’ve done it, and 2 days later had the fight of my life against the doona and the alarm clock!

I stayed up really late on Friday, because I got stuck into some

interesting stuff.  Saturday morning (around 1.30am) I got to bed, and then at 4.30 I hit snooze.  Next thing I knew it was 9.30.  I got up, but found my energy was off all day, and I was really tired by evening.  I got an early night, and woke around 4 again, thinking all was back to being right with the world.  Not so.  Monday morning I really struggled to drag myself up, and even though I did, I was tired most of the day.

Come to think of it, not much went right on Monday.  I even ended up knocking off early because I just wanted the day to be done with at work.  This morning, getting myself to work (no lift today) and aiming for the 5am bus, I set my alarm, but for some reason I didn’t wake until the second alarm – to tell me to get ready for work – went off.  I thought maybe the lightbulb had blown, but I just tested it and it’s still working, so I must have just slept through light, sound and all! (It’s a dawn simulator alarm clock.)  I did wake up around 2.30 for a toilet break and went back to bed, but I’ve done that before and still got up ok.  Strange.

On the bright side, waking up late (it seems ridiculous to say that about 4:15am, somehow) meant that I had to decide very quickly what was the single most important thing I wanted to accomplish with my morning session – and then knuckle down and do it.  That started the day off with a great sense of accomplishment, and it just seemed to go really well from there.  I think this is going to be a new habit – set the single biggest thing in advance, and go straight for it.

Image by dominiqs81 via Flickr

I also, finally, checked out what Steve Pavlina had to say about getting up early.  A lot of it I’m already doing, like accidentally giving up coffee, but one thing I’m going to try from tomorrow is spending a couple of seconds first thing just on stretching.  I like that idea.  Cats make it a big part of their sleep/wake routine, and I can’t think of a species more qualified on the topic of naps, can you?

Tagged as: Alarm clock, cats, Coffee, Dawn simulation, Energy, how to become an early riser, naps, pre-dawn starts, Steve Pavlina, stretching, wake up early