Getting up early
I’ve been reading Steve Pavlina’s blog on personal effectiveness (amongst other subjects) on and off for a while, and one of the topics I’ve found useful is on getting up early on a regular basis. It’s well worth reading the article and its followups, but in a nutshell, the method suggested is as follows: get up at a fixed time every morning, and at night don’t attempt to get to sleep until you are actually ready to go to sleep.
The reasoning is that if you’re in bed lying awake for more than a few minutes, you’re probably not tired enough. Your body will learn that it has a fixed wake-up time, and therefore you will feel tired at a time when you should be getting the amount of rest you need. You could then be ready for bed at a variety of different times depending on your need for sleep. A yardstick for this time is if you can’t read more than a page or two of a book without your eyes closing involuntarily.
Now I think I tend to go a bit past this stage, possibly due to activities that are too stimulating; sitting at a computer (whether doing something mentally taxing [like writing this post!] or just browsing email/news) seems to keep me awake, whereas if I get into bed and then start reading a book, I will often immediately start feeling tired. So I really ought to start on the dead tree-based reading material earlier.I first tried Steve P’s how to be an early riser technique a few months ago, aiming to get up at 6 a.m. every day, weekends included. I didn’t quite manage it on a regular basis, but I at least got into the habit of getting up at a reasonable time on weekends, very rarely sleeping in past 8, and usually getting up earlier than this.Having recently re-read his posts on this topic, I have attempted to re-commit to getting up early, now aiming for 5 o’clock. It worked for the first couple of days, but I have been gradually slipping back towards 6:30-7 over the course of last week.
I’d really like to get back into it, as whenever I do manage to get up early, after a short period of feeling very tired (maybe 10-15 minutes after getting up), I find I tend to be a lot more productive for the whole day, as well as having an extra hour or two to do things before I leave for work. The problem is, the version of “me” that has to try to get me out of bed is totally oblivious to the upcoming productivity boost, and resists movement of any sort as much as possible.
Referring back to Steve’s website, how does he suggest you overcome this inability to get up at the time you’ve set for yourself? By conditioning yourself to react to the stimuli in question, i.e. “practise” lying in bed in your pyjamas with the room darkened, waiting for the alarm to go off, switch it off, get up, and repeat until it becomes second nature.
It may yet come to this… I’ll see how I get on tomorrow.