Ways to Change How You Wake Up In the Morning

They say you cannot cheat nature. Well, as in the case of sleep, you can find a few ways of outsmarting this ‘hold you down’ agent...lol. This is very necessary especially when you live in a city like Lagos that literally ‘never sleeps’. By 4.30am, the whole place is buzzing and set again for a new day..tough life, isn’t it?

Anyway, we have to do what we have to do, and these few ways will help you get better waking up in the morning:

1. Move your alarm clock across the room.

The easiest way to force your brain to stay awake is to get your body moving immediately. Placing your smartphone across the room and setting your alarm clock will most definitely force you to stand up and walk over to shut it off. You no longer leave the choice whether to stand up to your half-asleep body. You really have no other choice but to stand up and turn the alarm off.

2. Put off the fan once you’re up.

For the fan users, this is crucial because as long as the fan is on, it keeps blowing your eye lids close. That’s why most times when power goes off and the fan stops working, you most likely wake up, unless you’re the kind that can sleep on water…lol

3. Make your first task super-easy.

After the alarm and the fan go off, a little bit of temptation still exists to crawl back into that warm, comfortable blanket. But, again, you need your smart brain to wake up and take control, so you give yourself an incredibly easy task to accomplish.

One of the easiest tasks? Drinking a glass of water. That might sound silly, but drinking a glass of water has a couple of benefits. Besides quenching dehydration due to the lack of water during the night, drinking water gives your smart brain a quick win amongst other things. You've made a positive choice.

The next could be brushing your teeth - because the toothbrush is sitting right there. Again, it's a simple task that doesn't require hard work, so your brain doesn't resist.

4. Set out your clothes the night before.

You don't want to leave your wardrobe choice to your ‘booting’ brain. If the clothing choice is left to him, he'll still choose bed over getting dressed..lol

So, you pick your my clothes the night before and leave them in a conspicuous place that even your  brain won't miss.

5. Write down your morning goal the night before.

To do this, you must determine exactly what big task you'll need to accomplish once you start your day. If I don't have a clearly defined purpose for waking up, you'll either go back to sleep or just lie on the bed aimlessly scrolling your Instagram/Twitter/Facebook feed(s) for over an hour, completely defeating the purpose of waking up early.

So, each evening before going to bed, set your plan for the following morning. Just a short list (sometimes just one item) on your phone will do.

All these help you accomplish a few things:

First, you’re not showing up to the day unprepared. Therefore no time is wasted.

Second, the tasks you choose are probably always the most important thing you need to do. If you accomplish nothing else in the entire day, you can still consider this particular day a "win" because you completed your most important thing.

Waking up early, then, doesn't take mounds of self-control, the right genes or a super power. You just simply need to learn and practice these few tricks in order to outsmart nature so to say.