How to Actually Wake Up in The Morning

The solution no one else talks about

You don’t have to throw your alarm at the wall. There’s another way.

Somewhere around the time of my first year in university, I developed the most annoying problem known to man.

Not being able to wake up without a thousand alarms… and still waking up late anyway.

This plagued me for a long while, and nothing anyone else suggested worked. But one day, I thought - this is a simple thing, it can’t possibly be that hard to solve. So - I went direct.

Today, I present to you a simple protocol (takes around 10 mins) to solve the problem of waking up to your alarm - your very first alarm - almost for good.

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What we’re going to be doing is training your ability to wake up to your alarm. Over time you’ve developed a habit of snoozing it, or making 10 of them so by the tenth you have no choice but to wake up.

Let’s change that.

1 tiny bit of prep work beforehand: you need to decide on how you’re going to respond to your alarm when you wake up. My personal recommendation:

• Have your phone on the other side of your room

• Pick it up and open the door BEFORE you turn the alarm off.

• Leave the room for a second or two.

The Training

Sometime during the evening, or during the day if you can’t do the evening for some reason:

1. Set your phone on the other side of the room

2. Set a timer for 3 minutes.

3. Get in bed and close your eyes - imagine you’re actually going to sleep.

4. When the timer rings, perform your alarm routine. The same one we decided on above: get up - pick up your phone - open your door - leave the room for a second.

5. Reset the alarm for 3 mins.

6. Repeat 3 times (minimum) in total

The closer you can do this to when you’re actually sleeping, the better. But if it’s anytime in the evening, it should almost certainly work.

How does this help?

What you’re doing here is re-training your response to the stimulus of your alarm. Instead of groggily swiping it off in the morning, you’re training yourself to get UP, open your door and have some presence of mind before you turn it off. That way you’re far less likely to try to snooze the alarm or go back to bed to get those gorgeous sleep feels back.

The training part of this is important. Just leaving your phone on the other side of the room is a big improvement over normal, but you’ll still be tempted to snooze it and go back into bed.

But if you train yourself to stop the alarm only AFTER you’ve got up and opened your door, it’ll become almost automatic to get up and stay up, and the automaticity you have now of snoozing the alarm until you have to rush out of bed will have vanished.

Technique Enhancers

• Perform the training within an hour or 2 of bedtime

• Perform the training for 20 mins instead of 10 (so 6 repeats instead of 3)

• Schedule it in your calendar to do once a week for the first few weeks to make the change permanent.

Until next time.