Here’s a fun fact about me: my brain doesn’t work after 9 p.m. There is no possible way that I can do complex math, finance homework or essay writing past this time. It’s just my luck that my brain works well early in the morning– but that means I can’t enjoy the beautiful thing that is sleeping in.
I am a serial snooze button hitter. I have snoozed from ten minutes to two hours and I’m not proud of it. I knew that if I could just get up earlier, right when my alarm went off, I could feel more productive throughout the day.
I decided I wanted to set my alarm for 7 a.m. every morning. However, I knew that if I had my phone right beside my bed I was going to press the snooze button too many times. There are two key things you need to do if you actually want to get up when your alarm goes up. First, you must charge your phone in a place you can’t reach from your bed. For me, this is my desk. Second, your alarm has to be annoying. When I first started getting up early, I used the alarm “silk” on my iPhone. For those of you who are not familiar with it, it’s a soft harp sound. I didn’t mind letting it play at my desk while I was still in bed, just because it didn’t annoy me so much. However, that lead to more sleeping in. I knew that I needed to use a more annoying sound to motivate me to get out of bed to turn it off. I switched to “radar,” the default alarm sound on my phone, and it worked perfectly to get me out of bed. My advice basically comes down to these two key points: charge your phone on the opposite side of the room and choose an annoying alarm.
Waking up early to get more work done is good, but I have found that I’m also gaining more time throughout the day to do things for myself I normally wouldn’t have time for. I now have time to go out for a walk, read and workout. All these things make me feel better and healthier. I have indirectly elongated my days by capitalizing on the mornings when I can get work done instead of staying up late when I can’t. There’s no point in counting on productivity at night when I already know that I’m going to be distracted. I’m still awake for the same number of hours every day, I just go to bed a little earlier instead of watching Netflix during my hours of unproductivity.
I know that a lot of people hate the mornings but I think they bring a sense of calm, peace and quietness that you can’t get late at night. When you wake up, your brain is a blank slate. It isn’t crowded with things that have already happened that day or worries about the next day. That in and of itself is something that is so rare for us. If you feel like you’re not getting enough done during the day or you wish you had more time for yourself, try waking up a little earlier. If you have to snooze some days, that’s perfectly okay too because we are all imperfect. I’m guilty of getting up to get my phone from my desk just to bring it back to bed with me- and that’s okay! All in all, I have learned to love mornings, and you could too.
And if you’re wondering: yes, I did write this early in the morning– and I still have time to do so much else today.