If you are a night owl that has a secret yearning to become an early bird, it is never too late to make the switch.
For as long as I can remember, I have always been more than willing to stay up past my bedtime.
Mornings were always the worst part of the day for me especially when I would look out my window and have my gaze met with a dark, miserable sky.
As a kid I mastered the art of getting ready as quickly as possible just so I could have more time to sleep in before school.
Now that I am older and can choose my schedule with work and university, I rarely have to get up early and can often be found snoozing away past 9am.
Although this lifestyle seemed luxurious in the beginning, it slowly lost its charm.
I realised that my productivity was at an all-time low and I began to develop a sense of guilt for wasting away those potential hours of productivity in the morning.
Although my sleeping pattern is still a work in progress, these were the strategies I found most useful during my two-week trial of attempting to trick myself into becoming a morning person.
Goodbye Phone
Putting my phone on the other side of the room before bed, forced me to get up and turn off my disturbingly loud alarm clock in the morning.
The physicality of having to get out of bed was one of my biggest struggles so I would say this simple manoeuvre successfully got the job done.
The hardest part of this situation was actually putting my phone away the night before, purely because scrolling through Instagram was my go-to way of falling asleep.
According to Kris Gunnars, nutrition researcher for Healthline, “When it gets dark, your pineal gland secretes the hormone melatonin, which tells your body to get tired and go to sleep.”
“Blue light, whether from the sun or a laptop, is very effective at inhibiting melatonin production – thus reducing both the quantity and quality of your sleep.”
Don’t Get Back Into Bed For 1 hour
After I was rudely awakened by my alarm across my room, I had to figure out to stay away from my bed.
I decided I would give myself a 1 hour ban from getting back into bed so that I wasn’t tempted to go back to sleep.
During this time, I did all the things I would normally do once I woke up like brushing my teeth, washing my face and gulping down a huge glass of ice, cold water.
Unusual to my normal routine, I would open up all the blinds, let the sun in and proceed to go outside. Even just for 5 minutes.
Getting out of the house and into the sunlight sent a message to my brain alerting it that my day was starting now.
According to the Healthline, “Daylight helps regulate your circadian rhythms and improves your sleep.”
“If you get some sun first thing in the morning, it can help boost your mood and energy levels for the rest of the day.
Exercise As Soon As You Can
According to a study by The Journal Of Physiology, morning exercise has potential to help shift and improve your sleeping patterns.
I found that when I exercised in the morning, relatively soon after waking up, not only did I have more energy to exert throughout the day, I was also more likely to fall asleep earlier.
This helped me fall into a healthy sleeping routine to maintain for the rest of the week.
Motivating myself to hit the gym in the morning wasn’t as challenging since I had already been awake for a while.
In fact, it was a great way to use up my first hour of the day once I left my bed.
According to Total Wellness, “breaking an early morning sweat will reward you with a rush of endorphins, serotonin and dopamine – feel-good-chemicals that will boost your mood and help zap stress.”
There are certainly several physical and mental health benefits that coincide with exercising in the morning.
For example, I found that because I was put into such a great mood after working out, I was more likely to want to do work in the morning and as a result my productivity levels sky rocketed.
Five Second Rule
If none of the above morning-person-hacks work for you, try the Five Second Rule method.
Mel Robbins, a CNN commentator wrote a book based on this concept where you count down backwards from five and then immediately do the thing you would normally hesitate to do.
I found this process to be quite effective when waking up because it left no time for um-ing and ah-ing, successfully forcing me to hop out of bed.
