BriceMorrison.com Life is a Game

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Over the past month and a half, I have been on a challenge to learn how to wake up at 8 A.M.. This has been something that has eluded me my whole life; my natural tendency is to sleep for 9.5 hours every night and wake up at 10:30 A.M. or later. As someone who wants to be very productive and suck all the fun out of life that I can, this soft spot in my habits has always plagued me.

The Results:
I was able to wake up at 8:00 A.M. 17 out of the 30 days; about 56%. The other 13 days when I got up late were learning experiences to figure out what I was doing wrong. Now that I’ve figured out what needs to be done, I expect that if I continued tracking, then my success percentage would continue to go up. I’ll post another update one month from now to see if that’s true.
Here was the progress chart (X’s represent days when I accidentally slept in):
1,2,X,4,5,X, 7,X,9,10,
X,X,X,X, 15,X,X,X,19,X,
X, 22,23, 24,X,26,27,28,29,30

When I originally started, then my goal was to wake up at 8 A.M. every day. After the 14th day, however, when I had failed 4 days in a row, I decided that this wasn’t actually the goal. Sometimes I actually did want to sleep in. Sometimes I wanted to stay up late, out with friends or for some other reason. Having to arbitrarily wake up at 8 was needless and interfered with my life, which made me loath the goal. This in turn would have made it even more difficult to achieve.

Thus, I realized the goal wasn’t to get up at 8 everyday, it was to be able to get up at 8 when I wanted, deciding the day before. After I realized this then I started tracking not every day, but rather only the days when I decided I wanted to wake up at 8 (Which is why this took a little more than a month). This single revelation proved to be incredibly beneficial.

The Root Causes
My goal in this Challenge was to learn what the components of waking up early were. I had tried many times before and had failed, so there had to be something I was missing other than “more willpower”.

Something more did turn out to be missing. I found that being able to wake up early seemed to be influenced by just general two factors.

1. Make sure you are getting enough sleep.
2. Make sure you get out of bed right when your alarm goes off.

That was it. If I could do these, then I would be able to wake up early. Now, these probably seem obvious, but the devil is in the details, the solutions to which I’ll explain in a moment.

The first factor, getting enough sleep, was key. If I wasn’t getting enough sleep, then waking up early was really pointless; it just became a goal of sleeping less than my body needed. That’s unhealthy, unsustainable, not to mention very difficult.

The second factor, getting out of bed right when my alarm went off, was also absolutely necessary. Even if I had been getting enough sleep, often my alarm would go off, and I would (in my sleepy comfy state) opt to sleep for another hour. I found that sleeping is like riding a train: the conductor would say, “Do you want to get off at the 8 A.M. stop?” If I said no, then the next train stop was at 9:30. There was no in-between.

I developed my own personal tricks for making sure that I satisfied these two factors, but I think that if you came up with your own tactics to target them, then you would also be successful.

The things I did to make sure I got enough sleep and got up when my alarm went off were as follows:

Be willing to go to bed earlier.
This was a big challenge. If I kept going to bed at 2 A.M. like I normally did, then it was ridiculous to try and wake up at 8. To wake up at 8, I was going to need to go to sleep at midnight.

At first I hated this, because it seemed like I was giving up time; I was ending my night prematurely. Eventually I learned that a better way of looking at it was that I was simply moving 2 of my hours from the morning to the evening, but I was stubborn and this took a while for me to be happy.

On days when I didn’t want to wake up at 8 the next morning, I would still stay out until 2:00A.M. or so. This was fine, because the next night I would just go to bed again at midnight. Obviously the further I drifted the more time it would take to recover, but being aware of my bedtime was all that really mattered. Sometimes this did result in me getting in bed and just laying there until I became sleepy, but it still seemed to work out.

Don’t eat any food within 2.5 hours of going to sleep.
This was to help with getting up when my alarm goes off. I don’t know the science behind it, but I found that when I ate a really late dinner or had a delicious midnight muffin, then it was noticeably more difficult for me to get out of bed in the morning. I woke up groggy, unhappy, and I hated life. So now I don’t eat anything after 9:30, and if I’m eating a big dinner, I try to be done by 8 P.M..

Drink water before going to bed.
Sometimes I would forget to drink water at night, and I would wake up in the middle of the night very thirsty. This was keeping me from getting the sleep I needed. Have a cup of water before sleeping kept this at bay.

Set a backup alarm.
This was a suggestion given by some of the people who posted on my wall. I founded that even if I didn’t eat food, drank water, and got to bed before midnight, I found it difficult to pull myself from my warm bed into the cold, dark world. I would even wake up naturally sometimes, at about 7:50, so I knew that I was doing something right, there was just this last hurdle. How could I get myself to just wake up instead of opting to stay in bed for another hour?

What I did was set a backup alarm. In college I had attempted to set the alarm clock across the room so that I had to wake up. I hated this and found it to be very jarring. Ideally, I wanted to wake up peacefully on my own and choose, of my own free will, to get out of bed, not be blasted by some alarm across the room and not even have time to stretch.

So I set my normal alarm by my bed to go off at 8:00, and then I set my cell phone (across the room) to go off at 8:05. I made sure they were synchronized and exact. This proved to be incredible effective. I would wake up naturally or by my first alarm, lay in bed for a minute coming to consciousness, and then get up to turn off my other alarm. About 90% of the time my backup alarm doesn’t even go off; just knowing that it’s going to go off was enough to get me up, which was what I wanted.

Early Riser
And that’s really all there is to it. For 8 of the last 9 days I was able to wake up at 8 without any problems, loathing life, or grogginess. I was able to get more things done and felt like I was in control of my day. I was surprised to find that this even worked when I threw off my body clock by changing time zones for a trip I made. All I did was make sure I would be able to get enough sleep and get out of bed right away, and I made the transition smoothly.

Today (Saturday) I decided to sleep in until about 9:00, and that’s fine. Tomorrow I’ll wake up at 8:00 again. I’m incredibly satisfied that this has worked for me, and I hope that it’s useful to other people who might be interested in the same thing. I think that posting on Facebook was helpful because it kept me accountable and let me analyze what was happening each day so I could figure it out. Big thanks to everyone who was following me, “I like this”-ing me, and so forth. It was encouraging. I’ll probably continue to populate your news feeds with other random projects.

See you tomorrow at 8!

Best,
Brice