Overcome Your Inability to Get Out of Bed in the Morning

What a Life Skill!

Some strategies for getting out of bed which will create more time to do creative projects in the day.

When I was in my 20s I was a certified night owl. I loved the peace and quiet that the night affords. Yet it wasn’t compatible with having to work with other humans, who typically begin a workday in the morning. Nowadays things are changing as the workforce is distributed across timezones with remote-only becoming acceptable alongside the trend of companies adopting asynchronous meetings.

Either way there was a time when I saw that staying up late was not healthy for me, and looking back I would imagine it came down to simply procrastinating going to sleep and having to wake up the next day with any sort of discipline. By my late 20s I realized that if I wake up early in the morning I could do things like work on music or go to a yoga or exercise class before heading off to work. It wasn’t long before I understood that all the bliss of staying up late could be found early in the morning.

Some challenges: I believe I was born a night owl chronotype (as opposed to the morning lark), and therefore getting up in the morning to this day is very difficult. I am careful to not attach my identity to this label though, and you should be just as wary of taking on personas like these as well.

The other big challenge is the snooze button! There have been studies that suggest that snoozing is simply not good for you, as you keep moving in and out of sleep cycles which might make you more tired during the day. Yet I will let you decide for yourself if hitting the snooze button for 10 or 20 minutes is a good idea.

If you have trouble waking up in the morning here are a few tips that I’ve collected over the years.

Have a Purpose for Waking

This stems from the pop-culture fascination with Ikigai, the Japanese art of living with a sense of purpose, which some people go as far as to translate the phrase to mean “reason to wake up”. Put into use, if you believe your calling is in music or design, you can remind yourself before you go to bed that this is your purpose and you will wake up so that you can make some progress in this area. When you do wake up, even in the messy fog of being pulled out of the dream state, you remind yourself that you are here to do ____ activity or _____ impact on the people around you.

This is one of the best ways of addressing a root cause for not waking up. When your alarm goes off, you're in a daze and you're looking for some of the most primitive comforts such as warmth and coziness, probably harkening back to your early days of being in the womb. But you need to get out of the womb as soon as possible, so activating some level of consciousness will be your ticket.

Wake Training

This is the first method that I used initially. It’s very bizarre but has a lot of power. Basically you train yourself to wake up, the night before. You get ready for bed in the dark and set a timer for 10 minutes. You go to ‘fake sleep’ for those 10 minutes, and when the timer goes off you pretend like it’s the morning and you go through the motions of how you’d wake up. This is to help train your subconscious what to do when it wakes up for real the next day. I don’t think this method works perfectly on its own but it’s quite useful.

Alarm Clock Choice and Placement

There are sunrise alarm clocks like the one made by Philips and dozens available on Amazon, the problem with these is that they are difficult for people in situations with partners and they don’t really address any root cause issues for not being able to wake up. On the topic of partners, any alarm clock is likely disruptive in this situation if the other person in the bed is waking up later than yourself.

I do believe it’s helpful to place the alarm clock on the other side of the room if possible to give you a bit of a boost in terms of having to actually get out of bed before turning it off.

There is also an app called Alarmy which can go many steps further, such as making you scan a barcode on the other side of your home in order for it to turn off. However Alarmy can be outsmarted, which goes back to not addressing a root cause.

Getting Light, Movement, Warm Clothes, Water and a Deep Breath

In this technique which builds on the other ideas in this post, I will throw the kitchen sink at you.

The faster you can get to a light switch that will turn on bright lights, the higher your chances of staying awake will be. If there is someone sleeping in the same room as you, that means you have to get to another room with bright lights.

If you can get a stretch in there, your chances go up a bit more as you start to circulate some blood.

Having access to warmer clothes will help give an alternative to going back under the covers.

Hydrate yourself with some water - I like to keep cold, filtered water in an insulated Kleen Kanteen so that when I drink this, it tastes fresh rather than a glass of regular tap water that has been out overnight.

You can pick any item off this list and make it your priority. So if you have a goal of waking up early in the morning, you can chain or stack one of these goals on top of it. “My goal is to chug a big glass of water after my alarm goes off”, rather than just saying “my goal is to get up at 5:45am”.

Count Your Streaks

I use an app called Strides to keep track of my progress in waking up on time. There are so many apps under the category of habit forming and streaks out there. The challenging part is knowing what constitutes a checkbox. I might get back into bed and stay mostly awake for a few minutes and feel like that deserves a check, but it doesn’t. So be careful when you use apps like these and notice when you try to fool yourself so that you can keep a long streak going.

Be Forgiving

If waking up and staying up is very difficult for you, then it goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyways), that you have to be forgiving of yourself when things slip. It’s probably the most important tip on this list. When we beat ourselves up, we sabotage our chances of getting goals accomplished because the critic has taken over. Lightly acknowledge that you are annoyed with yourself and vow to do better next time, which is thankfully only 24 hours away.