If you are one of the people who tells themselves ”I will wake up early tomorrow” every night but you always end up snoozing your alarms and waking up in the middle of the day with no time to tick off everything in your “To-Do List”, here are 5 things you can try in order to get rid of this bad habit:
1. Try going to sleep before midnight
Obviously, the most important thing that needs to be done in order to wake up early is to go to sleep at a reasonable time, preferable before midnight, since it has been proven that between 10 p.m and 2 a.m humans rest the most (see quote below). It might be a challenge for you to do that, especially if you are someone who is used to spending their nights watching Tv series until 4 a.m., but do not lose hope, the next recommendations can help you with that, too.
“The deepest and most regenerative sleep occurs between 10 p.m. – 2 a.m. After 2am, your sleep becomes more superficial.”
– Doctor Oz (see the article here)
2. Make sure you don’t nap during the day
Napping during the day might be one of the issues that keeps you from successfully waking up at the intended hour. When you take a nap, whether it is a 30 minutes or even a 2 hours one, it only prevents you from falling asleep early, which, as mentioned before, is the most important habit you need to take on. If you wake up at, say, 10 a.m, then you sleep for 1 hour between 3 and 4 p.m, it is clear that you will not be able to fall asleep by 11 p.m. So, try your best to stay awake during the day.
3. Keeping yourself busy
To make sure you do not get tired and take a nap, you can do the following things:
- Organize your day so that you have something to do all day
- Be active – it does not matter if you go for a run or a walk, go to the gym or even play your favourite sport as long as you make sure you do not sit on the couch all day without consuming your energy.
- Make a coffee – as everybody knows, coffee can help you stay awake when you are tired, so whenever you feel like it would be a good time for a nap, make a coffee instead and go on with your tasks.
5. Do not leave your phone near your bed
Putting your phone on the nightstand allows you to reach it effortlessly in the morning and so, it is easy to hit snooze and go back to sleep. Placing it somewhere across the room makes you get up when the alarm goes off, which is the best way to make sure you do not fall asleep again.
4. Use apps that challenge you to get up
There are plenty of apps who are made to help people who have the habit of snoozing their alarms by challenging them.
Alarmy, for example, has a wide range of things you need to do in order to turn off your alarm that you can choose from when you set it: solving math exercises, scanning the QR code of an item, for example your toothpaste which requires you to get out of bad and go to the bathroom, upload a selfie, writing some sentences etc.
