May 23rd, 2005 by Steve Pavlina
It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom.
- Aristotle
Are morning people born or made? In my case it was definitely made.
In my early 20s, I rarely went to bed before midnight, and I’d almost
always sleep in late. I usually didn’t start hitting my stride each day
until late afternoon.
But after a while I couldn’t ignore the high correlation between
success and rising early, even in my own life. On those rare occasions
where I did get up early, I noticed that my productivity was almost
always higher, not just in the morning but all throughout the day. And I
also noticed a significant feeling of well-being. So being the
proactive goal-achiever I was, I set out to become a habitual early
riser. I promptly set my alarm clock for 5AM…
… and the next morning, I got up just before noon.
Hmmm…
I tried again many more times, each time not getting very far with
it. I figured I must have been born without the early riser gene.
Whenever my alarm went off, my first thought was always to stop that
blasted noise and go back to sleep. I tabled this habit for a number of
years, but eventually I came across some sleep research that showed me
that I was going about this problem the wrong way. Once I applied those
ideas, I was able to become an early riser consistently.
It’s hard to become an early riser using the wrong strategy. But with the right strategy, it’s relatively easy.
The most common wrong strategy is this: You assume that if you’re
going to get up earlier, you’d better go to bed earlier. So you figure
out how much sleep you’re getting now, and then just shift everything
back a few hours. If you now sleep from midnight to 8am, you figure
you’ll go to bed at 10pm and get up at 6am instead. Sounds very
reasonable, but it will usually fail.
It seems there are two main schools of thought about sleep patterns.
One is that you should go to bed and get up at the same times every day.
It’s like having an alarm clock on both ends — you try to sleep the
same hours each night. This seems practical for living in modern
society. We need predictability in our schedules. And we need to ensure
adequate rest.
The second school says you should listen to your body’s needs and go
to bed when you’re tired and get up when you naturally wake up. This
approach is rooted in biology. Our bodies should know how much rest we
need, so we should listen to them.
Through trial and error, I found out for myself that both of these
schools are suboptimal sleep patterns. Both of them are wrong if you
care about productivity. Here’s why:
If you sleep set hours, you’ll sometimes go to bed when you aren’t
sleepy enough. If it’s taking you more than five minutes to fall asleep
each night, you aren’t sleepy enough. You’re wasting time lying in bed
awake and not being asleep. Another problem is that you’re assuming you
need the same number of hours of sleep every night, which is a false
assumption. Your sleep needs vary from day to day.
If you sleep based on what your body tells you, you’ll probably be
sleeping more than you need — in many cases a lot more, like 10-15 hours
more per week (the equivalent of a full waking day). A lot of people
who sleep this way get 8+ hours of sleep per night, which is usually too
much. Also, your mornings may be less predictable if you’re getting up
at different times. And because our natural rhythms are sometimes out of
tune with the 24-hour clock, you may find that your sleep times begin
to drift.
The optimal solution for me has been to combine both approaches. It’s
very simple, and many early risers do this without even thinking about
it, but it was a mental breakthrough for me nonetheless. The solution
was to go to bed when I’m sleepy (and only when I’m sleepy) and get up
with an alarm clock at a fixed time (7 days per week). So I always get
up at the same time (in my case 5am), but I go to bed at different times
every night.
I go to bed when I’m too sleepy to stay up. My sleepiness test is
that if I couldn’t read a book for more than a page or two without
drifting off, I’m ready for bed. Most of the time when I go to bed, I’m
asleep within three minutes. I lie down, get comfortable, and
immediately I’m drifting off. Sometimes I go to bed at 9:30pm; other
times I stay up until midnight. Most of the time I go to bed between
10-11pm. If I’m not sleepy, I stay up until I can’t keep my eyes open
any longer. Reading is an excellent activity to do during this time,
since it becomes obvious when I’m too sleepy to read.
When my alarm goes off every morning, I turn it off, stretch for a
couple seconds, and sit up. I don’t think about it. I’ve learned that
the longer it takes me to get up, the more likely I am to try to sleep
in. So I don’t allow myself to have conversations in my head about the
benefits of sleeping in once the alarm goes off. Even if I want to sleep
in, I always get up right away.
After a few days of using this approach, I found that my sleep
patterns settled into a natural rhythm. If I got too little sleep one
night, I’d automatically be sleepier earlier and get more sleep the next
night. And if I had lots of energy and wasn’t tired, I’d sleep less. My
body learned when to knock me out because it knew I would always get up
at the same time and that my wake-up time wasn’t negotiable.
A side effect was that on average, I slept about 90 minutes less per
night, but I actually felt more well-rested. I was sleeping almost the
entire time I was in bed.
I read that most insomniacs are people who go to bed when they aren’t
sleepy. If you aren’t sleepy and find yourself unable to fall asleep
quickly, get up and stay awake for a while. Resist sleep until your body
begins to release the hormones that rob you of consciousness. If you
simply go to bed when you’re sleepy and then get up at a fixed time,
you’ll cure your insomnia. The first night you’ll stay up late, but
you’ll fall asleep right away. You may be tired that first day from
getting up too early and getting only a few hours of sleep the whole
night, but you’ll slog through the day and will want to go to bed
earlier that second night. After a few days, you’ll settle into a
pattern of going to bed at roughly the same time and falling asleep
right away.
So if you want to become an early riser (or just exert more control
over your sleep patterns), then try this: Go to bed only when you’re too
sleepy to stay up, and get up at a fixed time every morning.
