How to Wake up Whenever you want.

Waking up early is something essential for anyone trying to be successful in life. But doing this simple task can require the best of our efforts. So we may try and succeed for the first few days, later we tend to fall into incompetency. This was my case too and I had to find some way that would get me out of my bed early and easily. After trying new methods, I found that the combination of the three methods I mention later in the article has worked wonders. And I’d be glad to share them with you. These three steps are: Initiate, Diverge and Enforce. I’ll explain in detail what these steps mean.

Before you begin

You need to know that I used this method to wake up early, not sleeping inadequately. The National Sleep Foundation recommends seven to nine hours of sleep for people between 18 and 64 years of age. So the most important thing for you is to ensure you get enough sleep. The tool I use to calculate when to wake up is sleepyti.me and I’d recommend you using it too.

Not getting enough sleep will reduce your productivity by a huge margin. So even if you are waking up at 4 am, you’re doing less than half the work. We don’t want that now, do we? So get a good night’s sleep and wake up early. And to do that, use Initiate, Diverge and Enforce. Here’s what these three mean.

Initiate

This is the first step for you to activate your mind. The moment your eyes open and you see the time is the time you wanted to be up, start planning your day. Think about five things that you have to do on that day, the most important ones. The initial stress on your mind jolts your brain and makes it listen up.

It is very similar to waking up in the morning and getting an important email, call or anything. The sleepiness just vanishes in those moments. You just wake up instantly. This is what I want you to initiate in your mind. The first three to four days would be tough, but after that, you’ll get used to it. As you initiate these thoughts, you need to get to the second phase of this morning ritual; Diverge

Diverge

Thinking a lot about the important things you have to do might send you back to sleep. Once you are done thinking about the five things, now is the time to diverge. Diverging is when you get your mind to think about something else other than dozing off into the sweet arms of your warm bed. Here are the two things that I do to start diverging.

I sleep close to a window and pull the blinds as soon as I can with a little bit of stretching my arms. The light works magically. The stretching to open the curtains makes me a little bit active, but the desire to sleep does not go away completely.

• I keep my phone on the other side of the room, way far from my bed so I have to get up and turn off the ungodly sound of the alarm. This makes my mind think about switching off the alarm and not about sleeping again.
• After I turn off the alarm and get back to my bed still trying to sleep, I go for the third step. I open any app, like Instagram or Twitter or even Google news, anything that would put the sweet blue light into my eyes and make my brain alert. It is proven that the blue light in your devices’ screens and even the sunlight makes the brain alert.
• Finally to completely get my mind off the topic of sleeping again, I open my notes app and write all the things that I plan to do for the day. Writing is important because it makes your mind work. (After I’m done with this step, I delete all the things I wrote in the To-Do list. I’ll explain the reason in another article)

After I have diverged my mind completely from the topic of sleeping, I move to the third phase of waking up; Enforce

Enforce

This is the step where I step out of my bed. When I was looking for ways to get up early, I came across a common tip which went something like “just jump out of your bed at once and you’ll be fine.” I found that to be very difficult. Instead of jumping out of your bed and scaring your sleeping partner, you should start things slowly.

I sit up and then stretch a little bit. After that, I stand up and raise both of my arms. This has two advantages.

First, you get a confidence boost when you stretch your arms up and act as you’ve just won Olympic gold. Tests have shown that it works.

The second thing is you get a good stretch that makes your veins pump all the deoxygenated blood back to the heart to get re-oxygenated. A great way to start your day.

After enforcing

Now that you are out of bed and ready to take on your day’s task, all you need to do is prepare your routine. Drink coffee or tea ( I am a morning tea and evening coffee guy) and you can work out if you want to.

Another important thing I do is get done with the most difficult task within the first half of the day. This is because as the day progresses, your productivity decreases. So doing the difficult task before is a great way to get more things done.

I hope this method will help you wake up whenever you want to as it worked for me well. But I cannot stress enough on the importance of the amount of sleep that you get. Always try and get a solid eight to nine hours of sleep