Six in the morning, the harbour wall, a coffee I have not started yet. The gym opens at half past and I am here first because this is the only twenty minutes of the day when nobody wants anything from me. Gulls, cold stone, a fishing boat coming in. I was not born liking this. Four years ago I could not get out of bed before nine without a fight I usually lost.
So when people ask me how to wake up early, I do not tell them about the harbour. I tell them about the night before, because that is where I lost all those fights. The morning is not a willpower contest. It is the last step of a plan that starts around ten the previous evening. Get the evening right and the morning is nearly free. Get it wrong and no alarm on earth will save you.
The morning is decided the night before
Three things decide whether you get up, and all three happen before you sleep.
Bedtime. You cannot get up at six on five hours of sleep for more than a few days, and after that you are not learning how to wake up earlier, you are learning how to be tired. Count back from the alarm. Seven and a half hours, eight if you train hard. That number is your bedtime, and it is not a suggestion. If you want to be up at six, you are in bed at ten. Not "heading to bed." In it, light off.
Screens. The phone in bed is the single biggest reason people sleep late. It is not the blue light, or not only. It is that a phone has no end. A book ends. A show ends, more or less. A feed does not, and at 11:40 you are still there, wide awake, promising yourself tomorrow. Put it on charge in another room an hour before bed. Yes, another room. If it is your alarm, buy a cheap alarm clock. This one change does more than everything else on the page combined.
The alarm placement. The alarm goes across the room, where you have to stand up to stop it. Standing up is the entire fight. Once you are on your feet the argument is over, and you did not have to win it, because your legs did.
Why the snooze button is the enemy
The snooze button feels like a small kindness to yourself. It is the opposite. Nine minutes of sleep after an alarm is not real sleep: it is light, broken, and it leaves you groggier than if you had just got up. Then the alarm goes again, and you make the same bad decision with a worse brain. Three snoozes later you are twenty-seven minutes behind, still tired, and you have started the day by breaking a promise to yourself three times before breakfast.
That last part is the real cost. Every snooze is a rep of "I said I would and I did not." Do enough reps and it becomes who you are in the morning. You are training yourself, just in the wrong direction.
Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.
Vince Lombardi
How to train yourself to wake up early: the two-week plan
Nobody goes from eight-thirty to six in one night. You try it, feel heroic for two days, crash on Thursday and sleep until ten on Saturday. That is not a plan, that is a mood. The body moves fifteen minutes at a time. So does the plan.
- Days 1 to 2: change nothing but the bedtime. Keep your current alarm. Go to bed fifteen minutes earlier than usual, phone in the other room. Two nights of this before you touch the alarm.
- Days 3 to 4: alarm fifteen minutes earlier. Bedtime moves the same fifteen. Alarm across the room. Feet on the floor at the first sound, no exceptions, even if you go back to bed after standing up. You will not.
- Days 5 to 6: another fifteen. You are now thirty minutes earlier on both ends. This is where it starts to feel real, and where you will want to skip. Do not. Hold the bedtime.
- Day 7: hold. No change today. Sleep at the new time, get up at the new time, notice that it is possible. If it is a weekend, keep the alarm within an hour of the weekday one. More on that below.
- Days 8 to 9: another fifteen. Forty-five minutes earlier than where you started. Water and light in the first minute, see the next section.
- Days 10 to 11: another fifteen. One hour. For most people this is the whole gap between "sleeps late" and "gets up early," and you did it without a single heroic morning.
- Days 12 to 13: hold, or one more step if your target is further away. Same rule, fifteen and fifteen, and never more than that in a single move.
- Day 14: look back. Two weeks ago the alarm was an enemy. Now it is a time. Keep the bedtime for another two weeks before you call it done. The bedtime is the habit. The alarm is just where it shows.
If you slip a day, you do not start over. You hold at the current step for one extra day and carry on. The plan bends. It does not break.
How do you get out of bed in the morning? The first five minutes
People ask "how do you get out of bed in the morning" as if there is a trick. There is, and it is that the first five minutes are scripted, so that your half-asleep brain does not have to think.
Feet on the floor. That is the alarm going off across the room, so it happens by itself. Then light: open the curtains, switch on the brightest lamp you own, or in summer walk outside for one minute. Light is what tells your body the day has started, and it works faster than coffee. Then water: a full glass, left on the counter the night before, drunk before anything else. Then the one thing you decided last night.
That last one matters more than the other three. Before bed, you wrote down the first thing you will do after the water. One thing, small and concrete: "put on the running shoes," "open the laptop to the document," "walk to the end of the street." It sits on paper next to the glass. In the morning you are not choosing. You are reading an instruction from a smarter version of yourself and following it. Michelle at ten in the evening is a much better decision-maker than Michelle at 5:40 in the morning, and I let her run the mornings.
Five minutes. Feet, light, water, the thing. By the end of it you are awake, standing, hydrated and already doing something, and the bed has lost. Everything else about the morning is optional. The five minutes are not.
Tonight: phone on charge in another room by nine. Alarm set fifteen minutes earlier than usual and placed across the room. One glass of water on the counter, with a piece of paper under it that says the first thing you will do tomorrow. Then bed at the new time, light off, no negotiating.
How to become a morning person without giving up your weekends
Weekends are where most people lose. Five days of six o'clock, then Saturday until eleven, and on Monday the alarm is an enemy again, because your body thinks it changed time zones. It did, in effect: a five-hour swing is a flight from New York to Lisbon, every single week.
You do not have to get up at six on Saturday. You do have to stay within an hour of it. Seven on the weekend, maybe seven-thirty. Then, if you want to, lie back down with a book, or nap in the afternoon. Getting up is the habit; staying up all morning is optional. Keep the wake time steady and the body stops fighting you, weekdays included. This is what people mean by becoming a morning person. Not that you love the morning. That your body expects it.
I train on Saturdays, so my weekend is a seven o'clock day instead of a six. That one hour feels like a holiday. Anything more than an hour is not a holiday, it is a debt, and Monday collects.
How to wake up early if you sleep late because of work
Some of you are reading this at one in the morning after a closing shift, and the two-week plan above is not built for you. If your work ends at midnight, getting up at six is not discipline, it is five hours of sleep, and I will not tell you to do it.
Here is what to do instead. First, protect the sleep, not the clock. Seven and a half hours after you actually get home and wind down is your wake time, whatever number that is. If that is nine-thirty, then nine-thirty is your early. "Early" means the first alarm, in the first hour you are able to sleep until, not a number on someone else's schedule.
Second, keep the wind-down. The hour after a late shift is when the phone eats your night, because you are wired and want to switch off. Same rules: screen in the other room, a book, water, the paper with tomorrow's first thing. Third, hold the wake time steady on days off, within that same hour. A night worker with a fixed wake time is a morning person. It is just a different morning.
A reason to get up
Here is what the plans and the alarm placement do not give you: a reason. You can get up at six for two weeks on mechanics alone. To get up at six for two years you need something waiting on the other side of the alarm that you actually want. For me it is the harbour, and after it the gym, and the fact that the first hour belongs to nobody else.
Find yours and put it in the first five minutes. A run while the street is empty. Coffee with nobody talking. An hour on the thing you keep saying you have no time for, before the day gets to it. If you want words for it, the morning motivation quotes page is a good place to look, but the reason has to be yours.
And if the thing you cannot get yourself to do is the reason you wanted the morning in the first place, read how to stop procrastinating next. The first hour of the day is the best time for ten minutes on the thing you dread, because nothing has gone wrong yet and nobody has asked you for anything.
One small thing I do: I write to people every day. One quote, one photo from my day, one question about theirs. If the plan above is working, by the time it lands you are up, you have done your five minutes, and a message asking "did you get up on the first alarm?" lands on someone who can say yes. You can read how it works on the daily motivation page, and it switches off with /daily if you ever want it to. Two weeks of this and the mornings start to have a shape. Sofia Storm's guide to building self-discipline picks it up from there.
Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.
Seneca
When to see a doctor about sleep
Everything above assumes you are sleeping badly because of habits. Sometimes you are not. If you are in bed for eight hours and still wake up as tired as you went in, most days, for weeks. If someone has told you that you stop breathing at night, or snore hard enough to wake them. If you lie awake for an hour or more most nights no matter what you do with the phone. If you fall asleep in the middle of the day without meaning to. Those are not things an alarm across the room can fix, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
See a doctor. Say exactly what happens, for how long, and what you have already tried. Sleep is something people who train for a living take very seriously, and none of us diagnose it ourselves. Get it checked, then come back to the plan.
If it is the ordinary kind, the phone-in-bed and three-snoozes kind, then you already have tonight's assignment: phone out, alarm across the room, water on the counter, one line on paper. Then tell me on Telegram what time the alarm is set for. I will write tomorrow and ask whether you were up. I get up at half past five, so I already know how it feels.
