Summer is officially ending and with the end of the summer vacation starts the months-long struggle to rise in the early hours of the morning to go to school. If you’re anything like me, then you know that waking up energized and ready for the day is the night owl’s equivalent to asceticism and requires great sacrifice from those of us who just need ‘five more minutes please.’
1. Drink water right before you go to bed
When you wake up in the morning, your fatigue will be naturally overridden by the overwhelming need to use the bathroom. As an added bonus, if you make a habit of drinking water before bed every day, there’s plenty of other health benefits including improved skin and more efficient digestion.
2. Avoid using multiple alarms
A wise fifth grader once told me a very valuable cliché: ‘you snooze, you loose.’ The more you hit snooze or sleep past alarms, the harder it is for you to get up because you’ve trained your body to ignore the noise.
3. Go to sleep with the blinds open
We, as inhabitants of this planet, have evolved to a natural cycle. When the sun’s out, we’re awake. When it’s dark, we sleep. Letting the sunlight into your room slowly by keeping the blinds open allows for a more pleasant early morning than any abrupt alarm.
4. Cold water is your best friend
A cold shower or even a little splash on your face in the morning perks you right up in the most refreshing way possible.
5. Force yourself to get out of bed
As painful as this sounds, the easiest way to wake yourself up (at least partially) is to literally get yourself up out of bed and take on the day!
6. Give yourself a bedtime
If you fall asleep at the same time every night, your body will get used to getting a certain number of hours for sleep every night. If you do this enough, you’ll naturally begin to feel tired at that time as well. It may be hard to fall asleep at the same time every night, especially if you have a busy schedule, but try to stick as close to your bedtime as possible.
