How to Get Up Early in the Morning – The Do's and Don’ts

“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

- Benjamin Franklin

“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead.”

- Lazy guy who slept-in instead

One of the main things that inspired this blog in the first place was my view that a lot of the focus and content reflecting the views of my generation glorifies what you might best term as a culture of laziness, the postings of a listless generation that had every possible advantage and opportunity extended to them and yet still managed to turn out disaffected and disenchanted with their lot in life. One way to make a small, incremental change in your life that will bring you incredible benefits and contribute to your overall mental and physical well-being is learning to get up early in the mornings.

Getting up early in the mornings is one of the best ways to snap out of an undisciplined lifestyle and bring structure and focus to your days. Everybody sleeps in sometimes, granted. After all, that’s why weekends were invented, right? Still, if you sit down and do some simple math, you start to see why sleeping in, even for just a little bit, on a consistent basis is a major time killer that will eat up a massive chunk of your life.

Consider the following example: Johnny B. Example is a twenty-something with a non-descript job with non-traditional hours that give him some morning flexibility:

- Johnny sleeps in to 9AM, give or take, every morning after getting to bed after midnight (say for arguments sake he gets 8 hours or so sleep on average)

- If Johnny wasn’t in his self-described quarter life crisis and was motivated to get up morning, he could train himself to get up at 7AM

If Johnny makes this simple change in his lifestyle, look at the productive gains:

- Time savings daily: 2 hours

- 1 Week: 14 hours

- 1 Month: 60 hours

- 1 Year: 720 hours

- 10 Years: 7200 hours (0.82 Years)

- 20 Years: 14,400 hours (1.64 Years)

Given that there are about 8,760 hours in a given year, just getting up two hours early, on average, over the course of a twenty year period would add just over one and a half years to your life!!! Imagine how many people on their death bed would kill (no pun intended) for an extra year and a half of time to do whatever they pleased! Hell, if you got up even earlier, on average, at 6AM instead of 9AM from the age of 20 to the age of 55 (early retirement), you would have added just over 4 and a half more years to your life! Those are the kind of major productive gains you can make, and doing it is simpler than you ever thought.

Now here’s the catch: training oneself to get up early in the morning, day in and day out, isn’t necessarily a walk in the park (unless you’re one of those naturally chipper people – I mean bastards - who leap out of bed with the rising sun each morning, in which case this article is merely for your amusement). In fact, properly conditioning oneself in this manner requires an ongoing effort. But remember this: anyone can learn to get up in the mornings! If you’re willing to give it some time (30 days minimum) and stick with it, a month from now you’ll be reaping the gains only those who already get up early know all about.

Techniques for Getting Up Early:

There are a number of different methods that you can apply in attempting to get up early. Far too many blogs and books and everything have been written on this topic to mention. However, in my experience, the key steps can be boiled down to just a few factors:

1) Get up as soon as your early goes off.

I can’t stress enough how important this is. In fact, I think you could make a good argument that this is the most important step of all. Set your desired time the night before and with a volume that will wake you up instantly (depending on your age, hearing level, musical selection, i.e. classical vs. death metal, etc).

Once you hear your alarm, get the hell out of bed. Don’t think, don’t rationalize, don’t visualize, just get the hell out of bed. Every second you spent lying in bed once that music starts playing is a trap, and the more seconds you accumulate, the greater the likelihood that you`re going to think of a million and a half good reasons to stay there. My favourite is the warmth argument.

Others have suggested techniques such as setting your alarm a half hour ahead of the actual time, but this has never worked for me. You see, I`m not an idiot. So when I see the alarm go off, I`m not so naive as to think it`s actually the time it says it is. I then say to myself, `You can`t fool me, I`ll just wake up at the REAL time.`` The only problem is, if you`re anything like me (my deepest sympathies if you are) you won`t get up. You`ll go back to sleep. Hence the sense of urgency I`m trying to bring to stage one.

Steve Pavlina has also suggested that you train yourself, a la Pavlov’s dogs, to get up early in the morning by practicing your getting up routine (waking up, shutting off the alarm, getting the hell out of bed) over and over again at non-sleep times until you have conditioned your mind not to think when the alarm goes off. I have to admit I’ve tried this method, and I’m not a fan, mostly for the same reasons as above. I`m too damn smart for my own good. So that leaves me with the first and I think best option, which is get the hell out of bed.

2) Do something engaging immediately.

This second step is also crucial. During my numerous quests to defeat laziness, I inevitably woke up early in the morning only to move to a different room (say, the couch in the living room) and promptly go back to sleep there. This is particularly a problem where you have a spouse or significant other sleeping in the same bed as you, who likely will not be happy with your new resolution to get up early in the morning if you merely use it as a pretext to wake them up with the alarm and promptly go back to sleep yourself.

Therefore it is important to do something immediately that gets your mind alert, especially during that first crucial 30 days that you need to form any positive habit. You can do several things. You can shower (coordination), read the paper (mental concentration), get dressed (again, coordination), go to the gym or for a job (physical and mental stimulation), anything really, other than sit passively with heavy eyes. Hell, I once fell asleep on the toilet. Moral: do something engaging ASAP after getting up.

3) Stick with it!

The final stage of your getting up early program is sticking with it. Too many studies and authors to note have found that 30 days is generally a magic number when it comes to forming positive habits. So stick with your plan. Don`t take days off for Saturdays and Sundays if you can for the first month, and try to avoid staying up too late (although the reality is a few nights won`t necessarily throw you off the bandwagon unless you`re really not committed.

If you start waking up consistently, your body will gradually adapt. Before you know it, your newfound regularity will help you sleep better (and likely with a better quality of sleep) and you`ll be waking up, refreshed and alert, before your alarm, even if you don't set it.

And when you have doubts about your ability to keep going, just think about what you could do with an extra four years of your life. And then get the hell out of bed.

It’s My Party and I’ll Cry If I Want To

The recent prorogation of Parliament has drawn furor from numerous Canadian commentator-types. “How DARE Stephen Harper prorogue Parliament!” they cry. “He’s facing a growing grassroots uprising!” warns the Toronto Star.

I think these fine commentators are glossing over the true meaning implicit in the government’s actions. Think back to your childhood. Now picture little Timmy’s 8th birthday party, you know, the one that everyone in your class got dragged to by their parents against their will for several endless hours of agonizing children’s activities culminating with a sub-par ‘gift bag’ of dollar store treats. Now picture some kid trying to play with Timmy’s new toys or taking the attention away from the little jerk – what happens – Timmy cries and the party’s over. Take the same damn scenario and apply it in the sandbox, or in the park - same shit.

What’s happening in Ottawa these days is nothing more than an adult version of the classic birthday/sandbox-esqe temper-tantrum. Our Prime Minister, convinced that no one gives a shit about whatever the Opposition was complaining against (torture smorture!), has decided that if the Opposition won’t let him play with his toy (Parliament) the way he wants, well, screw you, no one can. Prorogation is really just a fancier version of "it’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to;" shit, who knew that Lesley Gore spoke Latin?

On Me Blogging and Other Assorted Ironies to Follow

The internet is full of blogs and bloggers. There are literally millions of blogs out in the ether on every topic imaginable, and some unimaginable. Now, I must confess. Secretly (okay, not so secretly) I have for many years been running an anti-blogging campaign, if only in my mind. To me, blogging was a dirty word. The mere mention of the word ‘blog’ on television brought my anger to the fore; the use of the term blogosphere in a newscast would result in a stream of obscenities enough to make your grandmother break out the rosary and pray for my salvation. Logically then, it follows that of all of the people in the universe that might feel compelled in some way to start a blog, it would be anyone but me. But hey, here we are.

It’s worth noting briefly why I developed a compulsive dislike towards all things blogging in the first place. Simple explanation: in my past view (a view that hasn’t significantly changed), blogs and blogging represented the advancing storm front of the dismantling of the intellectual culture of literature and journalism. The blogs that draw my ire operate like mosquitoes: latching onto the value-added product of journalists and authors and destroying print media one LOL-cat at a time. Okay, so my thoughts may have been a little extreme and a little simplistic - I don’t disagree with you on that.

Catching up with the present day, the reason why I have put aside my black ball of hate towards blogging, stopped shaking my fist at the first mention of the word blogosphere and started this written adventure is my growing realization that simultaneously complaining about the crappy content of the vast-horde of blogs while doing nothing about it is plain hypocrisy. This epiphany, if you will, coupled with my increasing antipathy towards the perception (whether real or fictional is a matter worthy of its own post) that my generation is nothing more than a self-interested, apathetic, complaining horde has been a call to arms of sorts. Decently educated and concerned members of my generation need to step out of the shadows of mediocrity and lead without title in an incremental and practical fashion if society is going to do anything about its ever increasing laundry-list of problems. Driving my sense of urgency is my background prior to law in history; after all, it is not difficult at times to draw parallels to the classical era of Rome – are we fiddling on our blackberries while our society burns?

Thus, I have come full circle. From my birth as an anti-blogger I now enter the ring in an attempt to chronicle the foibles and the follies of the present era: hence, "Copping Out."