Why should you get up early in the morning? Why not just lay in until about 11 or 12 every day and just get up when you feel like it? Well, there are some surprising health benefits to waking up before 9 that you might not be aware of.
Why get up early?
Getting up early means waking up and getting out of your bed before 9. It really means doing this before 7-8 but for some people this is harder, so to cover more people, we’ll say 9. It still has health benefits, and will still improve your life if you start getting up before 9, so read on.
Getting up early has a number of benefits, and it’s really good for helping you to get more out of your day. Aside from the obvious reason, that getting up early gives you more hours in your day, you’ll also feel like each of those hours lasts longer as well.
It has something to do with how your mind works and how you perceive time and the world around you, depending on what time you wake up, but every hour before 9 is supposed to be worth 2 after, in the same way that every hour of sleep before 11 is worth 2-3 after it. It’s something to do with the hormones in your body that react to light and darkness, and how they work at certain times.
The long and short of it is that by getting up before 9, you actually feel like you’ve got a longer day, a much longer day. This enables you to get more done, and is one fo the best tips for productivity. If you have things to do then get up early, you’ll feel like you can do anything. You might say ‘I hate getting up early’ but it is definitely worth it for the health benefits.
How to get up early in the morning
Getting up early in the morning has to do with a few things, and those things are as follows:
- Changing your bodies natural alarm clock
- Finding motivation to get up in the morning
- Forming a habit of it.
To learn how to get up early in the morning we need to look at each of these three things and work on them separately, in order to create a lasting habit: waking up before 9 in the morning. The first step is the bodies natural alarm clock.
Changing your bodies alarm clock
Your body has the ability to wake up and ‘feel tired’ at just the right times to allow you to get a good amount of sleep, enough sleep to recover from the previous day and feel energised and refreshed. The problem is that we don’t listen to is, and we try and change the bodies alarm clock with our own inventions.
The body is perfectly designed to wake up and go to sleep at the right times, but what happens? We interfere with it, like almost every other part of nature. We stay up later than we should, even when we’re tired, and then we get up early by having a loud buzzing alarm clock in our ear screaming at us to get out of bed before we’ve had enough sleep.
The answer is not to just keep getting up at the sound of the alarm clock, it’s to create your own natural sleep pattern. This will allow you to wake up without an alarm clock, on time, and you’ll feel more refreshed and energised. Sounds pretty good right? So how do you do it?
To reset your bodies natural alarm clock, specially if you’ve been abusing your sleep pattern for some time you’ll need to use an artificial alarm clock for a week or so. Don’t worry, yo won’t need it for much longer than a week. Set your alarm clock for a time in the morning that will be your ideal target wake up time, for example, 07AM.
Every morning, on a weekday OR a weekend, wake up and get out of bed at that time. No matter how tired you feel, and you will feel tired for the first few days, just do it. Get up and start your day, read a book, make some breakfast, whatever you normally do. It’s very important to do this every day or it won’t work.
After a few days, you’ll actually find that you won’t need to think about when you go to bed, because you’ll naturally feel tired at the right time. This is your body clock telling you that in order to get enough sleep before waking up at 7 in the morning, you need to sleep now. Listen to it! Go to bed when you feel tired, and wake up at the same time every day, regardless of whether you’re working or it’s the weekend. After about a week it will be a natural thing to do, and you won’t need to think about it!
Finding Motivation to get up in the mornings
Monday mornings can seem like a big drag, even more so if you’re not enjoying your current job. So how do you find the drive to get out of bed? Well, you’re going to have to find some motivation. That golden stuff that keeps you going when you don’t want to. Motivation can help you wake up and feel ready for the day, even if you might not enjoy what you’re going to be doing.
This type of motivation is found when you realise within yourself that there are some things in life you have to do in order to survive, and sometimes going to a job ins one of them. There are always ways to escape a job you don’t like, such as setting up your own website, but until that takes off, you’ll need to keep going to work.
In order to find motivation to wake up early every morning, think of life as an adventure. Imagine all of the things you could possibly experience during the day, and then rush out to find those chances and experiences. Put pictures of yourself or others doing what you really enjoy doing in life above your bed. Make sure you can see these pictures when you wake up and get out of bed.
If you’re not happy with your current job, read my article on Finding Your Life Purpose in 4 Minutes. Many people aren’t happy and struggle to find motivation in the mornings to get up and carry on with a life they don’t really enjoy. This can even be the reason they search for Personal Development blogs to look for a way to escape and change.
Make a habit of the early wake up..
This is what it’s all about, making habits that will stay with you. In order to make something a habit you need to do what’s known in the Personal Development world as the 30 day trial. This is a technique where you try something new for a total of 30 days, and if you do it for that long you’re highly likely to keep doing it.
It’s sort of like a way of bargaining with your brain about a new habit. You say to yourself, ‘It’s only for 30 days, how bad can it be’ even though after the 30 days, it will have become a habit and you’re likely to stick with it. It’s a powerful tool. So in order to keep your new habit of waking up early every morning, think about the following.
The earlier you get up, the more time you have in your day. You have the chance to do things that all the people in the world who are laying in bed can’t do. You have an edge over everyone else who doesn’t get up early. Lots of people lay in every day, specially those without jobs, so make the most of your advantage and chase your dreams.