Train to be an Early Morning Person

For most of my adult life I was a night person. Between grad school, my TV news jobs, and my goth inclinations, staying up late was required. But oh how I love shaking up life, and now that I have a home office, and do writing and property managing while juggling an 11 month-old and a 2 year-old, I’ve come to embrace mornings. And I’m not talking about 7am you nocturnal panises, I’m talking about a brutal militaristic 4:30am!

After Katrina I changed careers and went into Public Relations. Work started at 7am and was located 40 miles from my house so I got a harsh lifestyle makeover. Hell, I used to stay up until that hour more than wake up for it! Suddenly I was too tired to, er, absorb culture in the French Quarter until 3am on a weekday. Even staying up until midnight for creative writing sessions was out. I was too tired to think. When the babies came along the deal was sealed. Young kids wake up with the sun. I’d either have to learn to love mornings or accept that I’d never get anything done. The latter is not acceptable to me.

So how do you convert? Well, it’s kind of a baphometic fire-baptism. Painful! But when you finally get through it’s very much worth it. The pre-dawn hours are very rewarding. No phones ringing, no inbox beeping, nobody at the door, no din of traffic nor noise of children. Just utter beautiful ear-ringing silence. You can get much more done in a shorter period when you don’t have distractions. It takes me an entire afternoon to write one article, but less than an hour to do the same project before dawn. More efficient. More simple.

So if you’ve decided the night is no longer working out for you and you want to convert to mornings, just stop your bitching and moaning and listen to the master…

1. Go to bed early. Yeah dumb-ass, go figure. If you want to wake up early you have to go to bed early. Most people need 8 hours, but some can escape with less. If you want to wake up at 5am then you have to be asleep by 9pm. Oh quit stuttering, I know that’s a granny or toddler bedtime, but now it’s also a kick-ass motivated person’s bedtime! I can function on 6 or 7 hours so I go to bed at 10-10:30 and wake up at 4:30-5am. On weekends let yourself sleep as late and long as you want. And quit whining that you can’t fall asleep! Take Sominex or another sleep drug to help until you get the hang of it. I’m drug-phobic, but if you only use it a few weeks until you reset your brain and accept your training then moderate use is fine. On the opposite side, only take stimulants like coffee, energy drinks, or caffeine pills before noon, never after that. Otherwise, you won’t fall asleep at your nighttime goal hour.

2. Accept your training. Would you believe there are people out there in their 30s and 40s who hate to go to bed/wake up early because it’s not cool?!?! They actually hate that other people make fun of them for not being able to go out late, and still pine about their college days when they could sleep until 2pm. They have an image to maintain, a subculture that expects a certain behavior. Oh wahhhh, ya big lemming. Screw what other people are doing. What do YOU want to accomplish, and how will mornings help you with it? If you’ve decided you’re over the nocturnal scene and you want to wake up to train for a marathon, or write computer code, a novel, or just save the damn world, then you have to accept this as a major lifestyle change or don’t even bother trying. No one lasts long staying up half the night and waking up early, trying to please both worlds. Incompatible. Choose. Nocturnal or diurnal. Obviously there’s room to negotiate from time to time. For instance, in spite of my rigid schedule I keep slots open 1 – 2 times a month for very nocturnal events (things running after midnight). I try to schedule them on weekends when I’m allowed to sleep in (but in New Orleans it’s common to have a great band start playing at midnight on a Wednesday *sigh*). The temptation here is greater than anywhere, but my will is a force to be feared. So stop romanticizing the damn night. The majority of accomplished people from the sciences to the arts had flings with the night, but married the mornings to pull off their master works.

3. Get up when the alarm goes off. It’s amazing what we can do if given no other options. What if there was no snooze alarm? Well, you’d just have to get up the first time it rang then, or lose your job, fail your test, etc. So stop hitting the procrastination button on your life. Stop lying there and concocting ridiculous reasons for why you should keep sleeping and can do your work later. As soon as that buzzer goes off, train yourself to think why you wanted to get up, and what had you energized about it. Remember how excited you were about your project the night before and all the ideas you had. Then use those ideas to get the brainstorm brewing and motivate your ass out of bed. If you can find an alarm clock without a snooze option then buy it. I promise, you’ll be impressed by what you can do when you limit your choices.

So that’s the start – the basic training version on how to convert from nocturnal to diurnal. And remember, no matter how bad it sucks to wake up, it does get easier with practice. And when you finally master it, you feel really fucking superior.

Tagged as: Lifehacking