How And Why I Wake Up At 3:30 Am For The Past 2 Years

27 months later, while I watch people go on 30-day challenges of waking up at 4:00 am, the easiest thing for me is to wake up at 3:30 am and this has been the case since August of 2018.

My extremely early rise came when I was leaving on my own in India and had just finished my last course unit at university. I started panicking while asking myself questions that most people undergrads have like, “what am I going to do with my life now?”

The scare that this question gave me was the beginning of my unhealthy sleep habits. But I knew that if I was not going to turn off my scared emotions by flipping a switch, I would find a better way to work with those emotions to make my then unhealthy habits better and healthy for me.

In August of 2018 when I started sleeping for 3 hours, I also had the least productive time as most of it was me being worried that I was going to be a failure in life now that I was about to graduate and yet did not know what to do after.

Also, getting a job was a worse feeling than the feeling of me being a failure in life.

During this time, I ate a lot of unhealthy food, watched everything from porn to spirituality, TED talks helped as well as I consumed many of them, I read a book a day for 60 days straight something that I could never do let alone read one book a year and among all these things, my net productivity was negative since I was always tired and unmotivated.

The one thing that would never stop though was my early rising.

In India, things were much easier. Vellore, the city in which I lived was very peaceful in the mornings and I would walk from Brahmapuram To Vellore fort or cycle that distance whenever I needed.

I was on my own with no family or friends there so it was easier for me to do what I wanted. This helped me start to take control of my emotions that had run into panic and anxiety.

Since I could not go to bed and sleep past 3:30 am, I decided that I was going to reverse engineer my days to make that time productive as well.

This is what I did.

Calming my mind last thing before sleep and first thing after waking up.

The first and most important thing in my opinion for anyone who would want to wake up so early and make that time productive is to have a calm mind.

Sure, people who are stressed can make great early risers but that does not mean that they will be productive during that waking period. People in this state always wake up under the weight of their troubles.

In my case, my fears were justified as well given that I knew no one in this place, I did not speak the language, I had no job, broke as broke can be to the point that I would spend 10+ days in a row with no food but only a tablespoon of sugar and water (a story for another time) per day, and I was renting in the only place where the landlord wasn’t a bigot.

I knew that even if most of these fears were “real”, I had to somehow get my mind in control if I was going to spend my waking hours being productive and doing things that would create improved conditions in my life.

It took me a few months to finally convince my mind that we were going to be alright and when that happened, waking up at 3:30 am felt like a blessing and that made me more productive as well.

How I calmed my mind

There are many ways like meditation, getting proper perspective and so on that people do but it is hard to do these things in the beginning. You need to do something that will start the process before you go into those practices. At least this was true in my case.

When I first started by meditating or joining focus groups to get different perspectives on my life, these failed miserably as they only worked for the few minutes I was engaged in doing those activities and soon as I stopped, my problems were right there waiting for me like, “so where were we bro?”

Again, it's not that those things do not work, no, they do, I needed to exercise conscious will first to get the ball rolling and then those activities would be more like positive reinforcements to further the process.

Conscious will is also just the beginning of the process and it will get the ball rolling but it won't carry you far if you rely on it. This is because when you use your will, you are using so much of your thinking power and if you rely on it to get you through all these challenges, then you will have none left to do more cognitively demanding tasks like thinking hence you would be less productive still.

Before sleep, this is how I exercised my conscious will.

I decided that I would take a shower as the last activity of the day and during the showers, I would try to consciously focus on one statement. “We are going to bed and we are going to be alright.” This exercise got my mind ready for bed.

I also took cold showers. I never use warm showers so I do not know whether cold showers are what you should use or warm ones. I think it does not matter, to be honest. I took cold showers because Vellore temperatures were always extremely high and I kind of grew to like cold showers even today when it gets cold here, I still take cold showers.

This shower always took about 30 minutes given that I made my body expect it. I go to the toilet first then I brush my teeth before entering the shower.

All those 30 minutes I only focus on one statement. “We are going to bed and we are going to be alright.”

Many thoughts used to just come at me during this time. Fear, anger, frustration, optimism, possibility, and so on but this time was time for bed and I needed to disregard all those thoughts and concentrate on the statement in bold. “We are going to bed and we are going to be alright.”

When I got to bed, this is when I tried to meditate. At this time, I do not need to use my will to make me sleep. It never works. Have you ever closed your eyes while in bed for so long but without sleep, it is not just because you lack sleep? It is because you are trying to will yourself to sleep. The willpower just ends up making your body active until you decide to let go maybe focus on something else then only can you begin dosing off.

After taking your shower should you decide to try this, then you can meditate by laying flat or comfortably under the sheets, closing your eyes, and focus on breathing. Do not use will. Do not try to sleep. Just breathe gently and focus on breathing in and out and in less than 5 minutes you will have started drifting off to sleep.

This helped me sleep better but I still woke up at 3:30 am

When I wake up this is how I exercised my will and calm my mind.

Waking up was easy but not all the time. Some days, I just wanted to sleep the whole day but I will also keep me from doing that. In my opinion, this is the most important part where you should exercise your will.

Waking up can be really hard whether it is a conscious decision you make to stay under the warm environment of your bed or the unconscious actions you take to switch off your alarm and then wake up with no idea how the alarm did not work. When you have to do this at 3:30 am though, the difficulty is exponentially high.

Making a conscious decision to get out of your bed is the only first step you need to do if you are to make this work.

If you stay in your bed and try to start calming your mind while you are under the blanket, you will fall asleep again.

Do not try to think of anything else. Just get out of bed first.

When you do that, you should immediately start consciously monitoring your thoughts. In my experience, this is the time where I was mostly negative. Right after I got out of bed, I used to find myself irritable at even the smallest things. If I had been having any form of insecurity, this is when those insecurities turned up most of the time.

The key was to consciously focus on calming the mind. I never had anyone's statement for this time as I had for my before sleep routine because any statement that would be effective today always ended up being ineffective the following day.

So I decided to always decide to go with a statement that felt good. But where I fell short, some statements helped me start the process of coming to my mind.

The first statement was, “I can I will I do I am.” This statement most of the time got me excited for the day with great enthusiasm.

Another statement that worked often was, “ New day, better me.”

As you can see these statements were pretty neutral and they both put me in high expectations for the day.

I am not a talker so I do not say these statements out aloud. I also do not write them on paper and stick them to a wall. I never thought such habits as effective for me.

Anyway, I repeat them in my mind constantly while I am brushing my teeth and taking a cold shower. Another hack that I used to make my body get on board was that before every morning before the shower, I used to and still do pull-ups. I do not go to the gym but for some reason, 5–10 pull-ups get my body out of the sleepy state and I start focusing on the day ahead of me.

Being calm has helped me to work with my body rather than working against it but other factors have helped me sustain my 3:30 am wake schedule for a very long time.

Limiting Negative stimuli

The next habit I had to train is to limit my mental stimuli. It is very hard to leave in the world without knowing what is going on in the news.

But oftentimes, the news also brings the worst. It thrives on scaring the public but whereas this is good for their business, it is not good for your mental health.

Negative stimuli do not come from news alone. It also comes from toxic people, your negative emotions and insecurities, and negative events in your life.

You cannot go through an entire day without having or witnessing some negative event. That would not be bad if only people try to limit them.

The problem is most people do not take that effort and actually seek such news out and make justifications of all sorts.

The danger of having this much exposure is that it leads to mental exhaustion. If you are mentally exhausted, you will not be able to sustain the early wake-up periods for a long time without giving up on consuming negativity.

Sure you are going to have negative experiences in your day but there are some you can avoid. Seeking out the injustices of the world is not necessary unless you are going to do something about it.

Deal with the negatives you have in your own life and if you cannot stay away from the news under the disguise of trying to stay connected, then choose a few highly credible news sources. I have one that I use.

I know that this news source won’t constantly bombard me with false information since they fully fact-check their stories and thus I trust them. Anything they say is properly checked and so I trust them.

If you can, cut your news consumption in half and only listen to genuine news, not fake news.

Reducing my dependence on smartphones and Social Media

Smartphones and social media in my opinion are one of if not the greatest contribution of humans to mankind.

This having been said, however, most of us abuse these channels by overusing them and also deluding ourselves into thinking that our lives are not as perfect as those of other people we follow on there.

If you spend so much time on social media, this is something that you will soon experience sooner or later.

When it happens, you open up a channel of low self-esteem which then lets in other negative emotions such as jealousy, anger, guilt, and so on that, in turn, reduce your productivity.

When you do this, even waking up in the morning is hard since you lose belief in yourself as you spiral down a path of negativity.

In my case, I decided to break my dependence on the phone by switching it off entirely from 6:00 am to 6:00 pm every day. I kept a cheap button press phone that cost me $10 just in case of emergency calls.

On top of switching off the phone, I also decided that I would spend not more than one hour a day on social media.

Doing this for about 60 days helped me form a new habit where I am not so dependant on the phone neither creating the need to check my socials all the time.

If you can do this, go ahead and do it once every few months so that you can reset your brain. How long you do it will also depend on you. I find that 60 days at a time works for me.

Learning something new or create new interests.

When you start making changes as I have mentioned above, you will find that you have a lot of time that you previously used to waste.

You must quickly fill that time up with productive things and of interest to you.

In my case, I dove deeper into learning fine art that I had started in April of 2018. I started learning many more things that I had always wanted to do.

This will keep you excited and looking forward to the next day which you will then find that you will have less and less resistance while getting up every day.

Once you do not replace that time with productive activities, you won’t have anything to look forward to in the coming day which will be even harder for you to get up at 3:30 am consistent.

Going to bed as early as possible.

Going to bed as early as possible was something that helped me in the initial stages of forming a habit out of waking up so early.

In India, the latest I would go to bed was 10 pm since I lived on my own and all of my day’s work was always finished by 7:00 pm.

Between that time, I would catch up on any form of recreation and by 9:30 pm, I was always ready to start my going to bed preparation.

This is not something I can do right now since I am now living with my family for this year as we quarantine which makes it hard since we can have dinner as late as midnight sometimes.

But it was helpful for me in the beginning.

Take quick naps in the day.

This is a habit I had picked up in the seminary where the priests used to have a siesta every day after lunch. I noticed that this is far more important than just sleeping during the day.

During the day, there are times when we are least productive and at night there are times when we are most productive.

The trick here is to nap during the day times when you feel lazy(if you can) and also utilizing the night time when you feel really productive as long as it is not going past your bedtime.

Sleeping for a very long time (past 5-8 hours) at night used to make me feel really tired in the morning. If I slept past 8 hours, I would wake up with muscle pains sometimes and a lot of laziness.

When I started cutting down on my sleep however and instead of taking naps during the day when I felt less productive, it made me much more productive which in turn got me excited for the next day.

This was also very important in making my early rising a habit.

It is unhealthy to deprive yourself enough sleep and even though I wake up at 3:00 am, I always have about 7-8 hours of sleep per day through the major sleep and the naps I take during the day.

Studies reported that naps improve cognitive and psychomotor performance, enhance short-term memory and mood, and reduce both subjective sleepiness and fatigue.

If you abuse the naps and oversleep during that time, you will wake up foggy and disoriented. This is only my experience. Also, I noticed that taking naps at times when I am most productive also makes me have bad results with naps.

Taking a nap between 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm is ideal for me as well as a 30-minute nap sometime in the morning when I feel drowsy. This always gives me 7 hours if I went to bed at 10 pm the previous night or more if I went to bed earlier.

Whatever you do, if you want to maintain waking up so early whether it is 3,4,5, or 6 am without breaking down, you should make sure that you have 7+ hours of sleep within each 24-hour cycle. I break it into the major night sleep and naps spread throughout the day.

You can choose what works for you but the total has to be 7+ hours to maintain this long term.

This is how and why I have always woken up at 3:30 am for the last 27 months and still counting.