Some people are naturally early risers. For some people, mornings are wonderful! But what if you’re not a morning person? Some people are night owls and prefer to stay up late and sleep in later in the morning. However, society’s standard work schedules are not always accommodating for night owls and late risers. If you’re having a hard time waking up in the morning, it can cause a lot of problems if it’s affecting your work. The ultimate struggle of waking up fast and getting out of bed fast in the morning can have a negative overall impact on your whole day and make you feel groggy and tired the rest of the day.
If you want to change your sleep habits for the better so you can wake up earlier in the morning, self-evaluate what you find most difficult about waking up early so you can assess your current sleeping habits and you can find solutions on how to correct it and unlearn those bad sleeping habits so you can have a better night’s sleep and you can wake up early in the morning.
Why It’s Difficult to Wake Up Early in the Morning
Poor Sleep Hygiene
Sleep hygiene refers to habits shown to help encourage better rest and get appropriate sleep. The lack of a bedtime routine, a poor sleep environment, and excessive use of electronics can negatively impact your overall sleep.
Other lifestyle habits also contribute to poor sleep hygiene like consuming drinks at night that have caffeine or alcohol can make falling asleep or staying asleep more difficult.
Depression, Anxiety, or Stress
Depression, anxiety, and stress can all impact your sleep habits. Depression can cause both early waking and oversleeping. People who are depressed are usually too anxious or sluggish to get a good night’s sleep.
Interestingly, depression and sleep are a two-way street, which means that poor sleeping habits can contribute to the development of depression, and having depression makes it more likely that someone will experience sleep-related issues.
Sleep Debt
When you regularly lose sleep, that loss adds up to a total of sleep debt. If you lose an hour of sleep each night, you have a sleep debt of seven hours at the end of the week. You might try to make up the sleep debt with naps or sleeping in on the weekend, but these habits can disrupt your sleep schedule. As a result, you may end up sleeping in later than you intend to during the week.
How To Wake Up Early
Have a Good Sleeping Hygiene
Practicing good sleep hygiene before going to bed is also important for getting quality sleep the night before so you can wake up early in the morning the next day. Having a well-balanced diet, staying hydrated, and exercising regularly can all help you sleep better. And on evenings, try to avoid drinks with caffeine and avoid using gadgets that emit blue light because it inhibits melatonin production, which means you won’t feel sleepy even when you know you need to sleep already.
Let the Sunlight In
If your room is very dark, consider adjusting the curtains or blinds so that natural sunlight can come into the room in the morning and help you wake up faster in the morning more naturally. Exposure to sunlight at key times helps your body maintain its natural circadian rhythm. While darkness encourages melatonin onset, light exposure suppresses the production of melatonin. The sunlight will naturally tell your body to stop releasing melatonin and you will naturally be more ready to wake up when it’s time to get up.
Wake Up to Melodic Alarm Ringtones
Melodic music can be defined as a tune that’s easy to sing or hum along to. Melodic alarm ringtones, regardless of the type or genre, can lead to significantly reduced feelings of sleep inertia. Melodic songs seem to have an energizing effect which helps you feel less groggy as you wake up since the melody warms our brains up more effectively rather than being startled into action by a loud beeping sound.
The people who used melodic ringtones as alarms reported that they felt more alert in the mornings and that they had faster and more accurate responses. If your phone doesn’t have a pre-installed option for melodic alarm ringtones, you should download some for your phone’s alarm clock ringtones. There are a lot of sites online like All-ringtones.com, Mobile9, iTuneMachine, or Zedge, where you can download melodic ringtones for either Android and iOS phones so it can help you wake up more naturally rather than unnaturally wake up to a screeching alarm clock.
Move Your Alarm Farther
One strategy for waking yourself up in the morning is to force yourself out of bed. If you have your alarm clock within easy reach, hitting that snooze button is so tempting, and sometimes you end up just hitting the snooze button and going back to sleep. If you keep your alarm clock out of reach from bed, you will have to get up to turn it off. Once you are out of bed, it’s easy to stay up and get going with your day.
Conclusion
Getting enough quality sleep will help you feel refreshed in the morning and you’ll be more ready to wake up early. Even if you follow everything on this list, it won’t help you if you didn’t get enough quality sleep and adequate rest the night before.
To sleep better and wake up earlier, give yourself time to relax and cool down before heading to bed. Don’t forget to keep bedrooms as dark as possible when going to sleep to better simulate your body’s response to sleeping! Getting used to having good quality sleep and enough rest will help you to wake up early in the morning.
