Training Yourself To Wake Up With The Alarm
One of the success habits I’m working on this year is to get up when the alarm clock goes off instead of snoozing it several times. Even though I work from home and can work whatever hours I choose, my most productive time of day is early in the morning. When I get up at 4 or 5am I get an amazing amount of solid, productive work done just in the first few hours, and I usually have outstanding overall days too.
At the moment I’m not trying to get back into that early rising program. Instead I’m simply trying to take small steps to correct some bad habits I’ve picked up in the last year. One of those is sleeping until noon. For the moment I’m working on forcing myself out of bed at 8 or 8.30am. Once I’ve gotten that solidly on track I may try for an hour or two earlier.
Today I found this strange yet interesting post from Steve Pavlina:
How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off
It sounds strange and maybe even a bit silly because he advocates training yourself to get up immediately when the alarm goes off–much like you’d train yourself to do other things like lifting weights: With repetition.
The idea is to create a regular training session for yourself that involves jumping up out of bed immediately after the alarm goes off. And instead of trying to do this in the morning when you’re not coherent enough to have the self discipline… you do it during the day when you’re wide awake and fully aware of–and in control of–your actions.
By practicing multiple times each day for several weeks, Steve says you can train yourself to react the way you want automatically, without thinking about it. I have to agree with him. Repeating an action or process enough times ingrains it into your mind and body, so that eventually you do it “without even thinking.”
It may feel really silly to get ready for bed in the middle of the day and play pretend for a few minutes, then jump up and turn the alarm clock off–then repeat the process several times for many days in a row–but if you can handle the laughing and teasing from family (or even yourself) long enough, I bet this would really work well in the end.
So now I need to dig up enough courage to try it myself ;)
Tags: habits, self improvement
