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In this day and age, most of us stay up later than we should. Right before bedtime, most of us would probably watch some videos, surf the net, check on Facebook, and the list goes on. What’s more is that we’d probably sleep at 1 a.m., dread waking up in morning and constantly hit the snooze button just to curl up under the comforter a little longer. And when we finally decided to wake up, it’ll be too late to have breakfast as we would have to rush to get ready for work and we’d end up feeling the blues. Sound familiar?

Well, waking up early has its perks as you’ll have ample time to prepare breakfast, go for a morning run, and even avoiding the jam on your commute to work. Moreover, early risers are less likely to be stressed, depressed, or overweight. So if you’re determine to be an early morning riser, but don’t know where to start, here are some ways you should look into.

1) Why do you want to become a morning person?
First things first, you should contemplate on what are the reasons you have decided to become a morning person because it would be difficult to make a change without knowing why the change is important to you. Is it because you want to be more productive, have more time for breakfast, or you don’t want to miss out on another chance for workout? Having to think through on these reasons will help you focus in establishing the perfect morning routine.

2) Take baby steps to change your morning routine
Say if you start work at 9 a.m. You wake up between 7 to 7.30 a.m. (including snooze time) and it takes approximately 30 to 45 minutes for you to get ready for work and you would reach your office on the dot. Yes, you’d probably feel a temporary sense of satisfaction that you’ve reached on time.
But what happens next? You’ve forgotten to grab your breakfast on the way from all the rushing and now you’ll feel hungry and agitated which causes you to lose focus at work. So, you get home and aim to wake up at 6 a.m. the next day. Unfortunately, come the next morning, you’ve realized that you hit the snooze button way too many times that it’s already 7.30 a.m. What you should do, is to start by making small changes. For instance, start by waking up 15 minutes earlier instead of waking up 1 hour ahead from your usual time. Once you have gotten use to the change, add on another 15 minutes and before you know it, you’ve become a morning person.

3) Stop hitting the snooze button
Have you noticed how many times you hit snooze every morning? You may think that additional 5 minutes of sleep will do you good but it’s the exact opposite. It actually makes you feel more tired because it disrupts your sleep cycle. So, if you are already a chronic snoozer, change may not come easy for you to suddenly stop snoozing completely. What you could do is to find one day where you have nowhere to be and just sleep naturally until you wake up. Then, set your new bedtime according to the time that you have to wake up on most days. For instance if you have to be out of bed by 7 a.m., you need to sleep by 11 p.m. to ensure that at least 8 hours of good rest. It may seem unnatural at first, but once you follow this sleeping pattern, your body clock will reset automatically and soon, you’ll be able to wake up without an alarm.

Waking up early maybe a difficult task for you to do at first, but if you continue this morning routine for a week, you’ll notice just how awesome it feels.

Cheers,
Jessy Lai Chai Yun (赖彩云)