For many of us, waking up is a slow and painful process, both physically and emotionally. You lift your head at the sound of your alarm, feeling groggy, and think to yourself “just five more minutes”. This happens again and again, until you’ve had twenty minutes worth of “just five more minutes” and you know that if you don’t get up now then you’ll be horrifically late. Getting up has become a chore, and the sound of your alarm has been ingrained into your subconscious, triggering an automatic hate response whenever you hear it, regardless of whether or not it means you’ve got to get up. Surely, there’s an easier way to handle the morning routine? Fortunately, there is.
Waking up doesn’t have to be the soul-crushing journey it is. In fact, it can be a breeze if you put a couple of handy tricks into practice. The first, is changing the nature of your alarm clock. Get rid of the dreaded sound that’s plagued you for so long and bring something new in. In the spirit of waking up in a more natural, traditional fashion, we strongly suggest a natural light alarm clock. Designed to emulate sunrise, this style of alarm clock will gently bring you into wakefulness at a steady pace and then go off when it’s time for you to wake up. The light given off by the alarm clock gets brighter over time, reducing the amount of melatonin being produced inside your body, making you feel more awake and alert. This is the first trick we’d recommend you use to help you wake up more naturally.
Secondly, calculate your sleeping pattern in cycles. Humans sleep in cycles of 90 minutes, transitioning between different levels of sleep. From deep sleep to REM sleep, working out when you’re going to finish a cycle will have you waking up feeling fresh, alert and ready to face the day. There are multiple online calculators that will help you work out when you need to sleep in accordance with when you want to wake up (some of them even factor in the average 15 minute period it takes for people to drift off, too). However! It’s important to remember that things like coffee, smoking and chocolate/other sweet things (high sugar content foods) will have an affect on your sleep. Furthermore, drinking alcohol will severely throw off your body’s judgement of its current state of affairs, often leading you to have a bad night’s sleep and wake early, feeling even more grim than when you used to wake up.
Building a routine with these two techniques should help you on your way to feeling better about getting up in the morning in no time, we encourage you to look into it!
