How to Become a Morning Person Without Feeling Sluggish

Becoming a morning person and waking up at 5 a.m. can be a seamless experience with the right approach. In this article, we'll explore strategies to help you make this transition effortlessly.

1. Ditch the Blaring Alarm Clock

One of the first things that you need to get rid of from your entire life is a blaring, blasting, terrible alarm clock. That is not how you want to shock yourself awake. When you get up early, you have these nice theta waves. You switch from a delta wave to a theta wave, which is a very creative state, kind of like a state of hypnosis, when you first get up in the morning. If you have a super obnoxious alarm clock that can kick you out of that state quite aggressively, it can also contribute to more cortisol spikes in the morning, which can disrupt your sleep as you go on. If you do use an alarm clock, you may want it to be kind of quiet; you don't want it to be super loud. Better yet, use light-based alarm clocks that shine light on your face or use haptics. If you have a phone, a watch, or anything like that, you can set it to vibrate. You can use specific mattress covers or even pillow toppers that vibrate as the alarm system. This is a much more natural way to wake up, and it's going to make it so that it's not a bad experience.

2. Caffeine Timing

The next one has to do with our natural cortisol rhythms. You want to wait 30 to 60 minutes, preferably, before having caffeine. This first 30 minutes when you first get up is a delicate period in that you could be doing creative work that is allowing your brain to acclimate to the day. If you roll out of bed and you just have caffeine straight up, although it amps you up, it doesn't give you the actual intention that you need out of your day. So you want to wait 30–60 minutes for your cortisol levels to kind of balance back out before you add more stimulation and further spike those cortisol levels. What ends up happening is that if you do that, next thing you know you're waking up at four, and then you're waking up at 3:30 because you always have this preemptive cortisol spike in this preemptive glycogen dump that's called the dawn phenomenon that might start waking you up earlier, so it's very important. Roll out of bed, sit quietly, do a little stuff yourself, maybe do some reading or meditation, then have your caffeine.

3. Optimize Your Gut

The next one is regulating your gut microbiome. We're now finding in research that the gut microbiome plays a role in our circadian rhythms—when we wake up and when we go to sleep—but we also have to factor in the digestive piece as well. It's very difficult to get up early in the morning to be able to do something like go to the gym if you haven't done your business first thing. A lot of people who get up in the morning have to wait for their body's rhythms to get going to go to the bathroom before they can start their day. If you're having to wait an hour or an hour and a half for that to happen, that can be very disruptive. If you just get up in the morning and have a bowel movement straight away, you feel clearer and fresher. One of the best things you can do is utilize something like psyllium, flax, or chia a few hours before bed. That way, the transit time aligns with when you wake up. So generally speaking, you have like 12-ish or so hours of transit time if you have soluble fiber like psyllium or flax a few hours before bed. Along with quite a bit of water a few hours before bed, fiber is going to move through your system and help you be regular first thing in the morning so you can utilize your gut microbiome and fiber at the same time when you wake up. The other thing that you can do is kind of manipulate your probiotics a little bit. What I would recommend is that as you're starting to try to change habits, incorporate probiotics, prebiotics, and probiotic-rich foods. It's going to help manipulate the gut microbiome a little bit more as well.

4. Embrace Red Light Therapy

This next one uses a red light shortly after you wake up. You're going to get up in the morning, take 15 to 20 minutes for yourself when it's still a little bit dark, and then sit in front of the red light for 10 minutes or so and do some reading in the red light. This is going to start the cycle of allowing you to get up early and feel more awake.

5. Mind Your Breakfast

This next one is lower carb with breakfast. If you have a higher protein breakfast and a higher fat breakfast, it tends to satiate you a little bit more but also doesn't send you on a blood sugar roller coaster ride. Now this can allow you to align with your circadian clock genes. There's a study in BMC Medical Genomics that demonstrated this. If you want to have more food in the morning, you can get away with more protein and a little bit more fat in the morning as well, so this allows you to just kind of go with the natural rhythm of your body.

6. Exercise Timing

This next one is what you want to work out after your cortisol dump. If you roll right out of bed and go straight into a workout, this could be beneficial for a lot of things because you're not thinking about it. but what you do want to do is similar to your caffeine intake. You want to allow the cortisol levels to come down a little bit first. So if you get up in the morning, roll out of bed, and immediately run out the door and start going for a run, you are having a cortisol spike on top of an existing cortisol spike. This is a lot of sympathetic tone for the nervous system. Give it 20 minutes, 30 minutes, or 40 minutes before you go to the gym. The higher the intensity of the workout, the more you may want to wait. So if you're going to have a high-intensity workout, wait for 45 or 60 minutes. If you're just going to do some aerobic work, you can probably get away with 30.

7. Choose Cold Showers Instead of Caffeine

The next one is using a cold shower rather than caffeine. Try doing something that gives you a shot of adrenaline or epinephrine, like a cold shower, in place of coffee. Try doing this for the first couple of weeks as you're trying to become a morning person. This way, you're not just plugging in one additional crutch of caffeine; you're doing something that's more natural, and your body's able to establish a routine that way. Then, once you feel like that is normal, you don't feel like it's as much of a shock, and you feel like you're naturally waking up a little bit more, you can bring the caffeine back in.

8. Alternate Caffeine Days

The last tip that I have is to develop a little bit more tolerance for caffeine by alternating your caffeine days. Go cold shower one day, caffeine the next day, cold shower one day, caffeine the next day. Have this alternating system that allows you to not build up so much of a tolerance to caffeine, allowing you to maybe be a little bit more awake in the morning while also getting the benefits of a cold shower without making it so routine that they lose their effectiveness.

By implementing these strategies, you can successfully transition into a morning person who wakes up at 5 a.m. feeling refreshed and ready to tackle the day.