How to become a person in the morning if you are a night owl
How to become a person in the morning if you are a night owl
Whether you like it or not, even if you are the "most powerful" nocturnal owl, you probably have to act like a person in the morning. Whether it's your job, your employees, your clients people are not willing to wait until you're ready to start working.
The following is from Belle B. Cooper, co-founder of Exist, a personal analysis application to understand her life, and the creator of Productive, a course to help her work smarter, not harder.
Here is Belle:
I have always been prepared to get up before lunch, but I wanted to be a true person in the morning. A person "get up before the sun". A person who "does three hours of work before lunch every day".
For a few months, I got up at 6 in the morning every day. But something changed at the end of 2015 when I moved in with my partner and co-founder, Josh
Josh is naturally an early riser and works after I have gone to sleep many nights. I do not know if it was the rhythms of my own body trying to align with their residual feelings of stress and agitation due to the process of moving from home, but it took me at least six months to get into the routine of getting up before 8 am again. .
It was a real struggle. So difficult, in fact, that I sometimes wondered if it would not be easier to switch to a nighttime schedule to match Josh's employers. Every time I have tried this, however, I have lasted a day at the most. Sleeping late and getting up late is not natural for me, and it is contradictory to work hard to stay awake longer than your body wants, so I always give up quickly.
So getting up early was the way to go. I just had to figure out how to do it. When it came time to write my e-mail course, PRODUCTIVES, I knew I needed to have this thing up early, pat.
These are some of the things that ended up working for me. But remember: this took at least six months of experimentation and failure. If you really want to do this for yourself, you must find out what works for you, and you may find yourself on a long road.
Get up long before
There are many tips to get up early that advocate getting up a little earlier each day. For example, to gradually reset your alarm 15 minutes until you reach the desired wake-up time.
This makes sense in theory, but for some reason it did not work for me. Honestly, I do not know why.
I did not have a specific time to wake up when I started this process. I work from home when I feel like it, so I get up when I decide to do it. But I had got up consistently after 8 am, and I discovered that it was the last thing I could get up and still feel good about my day. Getting up after that made me feel annoyed with myself and slow for the rest of the day. It seemed to always end more if I got out of bed before 8.
Then, initially I set an alarm for 8 am and tried to get out of bed every day.
I was terrible in this. I failed very often. And almost every time I did not fail, I would get up at 8 and lie down on the bed or sit on the edge for half an hour before doing something. Apparently, I had achieved my daily goal, but it did not seem like a success.
After months of this nonsense, I tried something counter intuitive on a whim: I set the alarm for 6 am the next day. Two hours before, before the date I had been struggling to get up every day. I can not think of any reason why I would have thought this might work, but I'm glad I tried.
It worked.
It was easier for me to get up at 6 in the morning than two hours later. Part of this may have been simply the novelty and bragging rights that come with getting up early properly, compared to 8 a.m., which barely counts so soon. Or maybe that's just a moment of natural awakening for me. I tend to snooze and wake up more during the morning sleep, so it is possible that I am doing things more difficult by staying in bed until 8 and having a lower quality sleep during the last two hours.
I do not know for sure why this worked. It definitely did not work alone. Over time, I've done a couple of other things that have helped me make this a regular habit.
And these days, I do not always get up at 6. It's usually between 6 and 7 in the morning, unless you've had a particularly late night. I would love to get up even earlier, but this seems to be the most natural awakening moment for me. I want to work with my body, not against him.
Go to bed at the same time every night
I'm lucky not to have to plan this too much, because I tend to do it anyway. After dinner, I usually watch TV with Josh and, sometimes, I go for a walk. Then it's around 8 or 9 at night and I definitely do not feel like working, so I usually jump into bed. I'll have a hot drink, my notebook to plan tomorrow and my Kindle, and I'll spend an hour or two sleeping.
A regular bedtime is important to help your body fall asleep faster and to make sure you are well rested when it is time to wake up early in the morning.
Do not forget that I was going to bed at 11 p.m. at the latest. Most nights I was in bed at 9 or 10. My body naturally gets tired around 10 pm, and I do not like to work after dinner because I'm not very alert, so it's easy for me to go to the bed so early. If you do not get tired so soon, you may be naturally prepared to go to bed (and get up) later. You can fight against that, but it is much better for your body if you work with your natural inclinations.
Create a morning routine that you want
This is, without a doubt, the most important change I made in the construction of this habit. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely says that we are designed to think in the present. Although acting with the future in mind is good for us, it is against our nature to do so. To avoid this limitation of the human brain and make sure we do things that are good for us, even if we do not want to do it, Ariely suggests using a method that he calls reward substitution.
Basically, the substitution of rewards is when you start doing the right thing for the wrong reason. For example, if you want to train more, just letting yourself watch your favorite TV show when you exercise means that you will start training so that you can watch that program, instead of being fitter and healthier. . But you would be doing something good for your body, doing the right thing for the wrong reason.
When I get up in the morning, I get out of bed to have a coffee. Not because I know I will have a better day and I will be more productive if I get up now. Future is another person, even when he is only a few hours away. I can not motivate myself (at least not every day) to get up early so that some stranger in the future can reap the benefits. I need rewards now.
Building a routine that I do every morning when I get up helped me find a way (finally) to make early awakening habitual. Start with coffee, I wait long enough to get out of bed and start the routine. The rest of the routine keeps me out of bed. Says so:
Drink coffee and practice French
Do five push-ups
Shower and get dressed
Have breakfast
Coffee, French practice and breakfast are things I look forward to, so I focus on those parts of my routine after getting up. Each one acts like a rope pulling me forward through my routine until everything is over.
Another reason why this is useful is that although I get up early to be more productive, I do not have to think about work as soon as I get up. By the time my whole routine is finished, an hour or more has passed since I woke up, and I usually want to start working.
