7 Tips On How to Be a Morning Person

1. Reflect about the purpose of getting up earlier. If you’re mentally motivated to get up earlier, it can help to make a big dent in your sleeping-in excuses. Think about the reasons why you’d like to get up earlier in the mornings.

2. Go to bed earlier. To rise earlier, you’ll need to sleep earlier and that can be hard if you’re used to using the later hours of the night for activities such as reading, watching TV, or writing. Consider going to bed earlier in increments. Start with 15 minutes earlier, with the expectation of getting up 15 minutes earlier, then gradually increase this to half an hour and then to an hour. If you do this gradually, it will give both your body and your mind time to adjust to the earlier sleeping and waking times. It will also allow you to find your happy medium between too early and too late.

3. Set your alarm clock. Although it is important to learn to wake up earlier as a matter of will, your alarm clock is the main source of helping establish your new routine when changing over your sleeping patterns.

4. Help wake yourself up. It will be especially difficult when you first try to transition from night owl sleeping patterns to morning person sleeping rhythms, so there are some ways to trick your body into greater alertness. For example, turning on bright lights on first thing in the morning resets your circadian rhythm and essentially makes you more alert. Going out into morning sun would also do the trick provided the sun is up already; natural light will wake you up just as efficiently.

5. Have a good breakfast. Don’t be tempted to skip breakfast; it’s your energy source kick-starter for the rest of the day and the early bird has even longer to wait until lunchtime.

6. Keep the new morning rhythm going once it’s established. It’s important to get up at the same time every day once you’re established in your new routine, including weekends. Don’t sleep in on days when you don’t have to be somewhere; doing so throws out your sleep rhythm badly and it’s hard to catch up. Leave sleeping in for when you’re unwell. Instead, get up and use the time to read, enjoy a longer breakfast, chat with others, or exercise.

7. Persevere and be realistic. It can take time to transition from a night owl to a morning person. Moreover, being a morning person or a night owl has a genetic basis that may not be easy to override. As such, it may not be possible to switch yourself over entirely to becoming a morning person unless you’re a morning person reforming from a lapse into a night owl lifestyle. However, if even an hour or so earlier is giving you just a little more space than before you tried this transition, it can be worth the effort and the new routine in your life.