Your bed is warm and cozy, the alarm goes off and the thought of getting out of bed doesn’t sound too appealing does it?
I always hated getting out of bed earlier than I wanted to. I bet you’re like me in that the first thing you think about when you get out of bed in the morning is, “I swear I’m going to bed early tonight I’m SO tired!”
Now I get out of bed every morning with energy and anticipation. I love what I do.
How do YOU get out of bed in the morning? Is it a struggle like it used to be for me?
Do you lay there thinking “just 10 more minutes….”
I used to do that every morning. It was hard for me to get out of bed in the morning when I had to set an alarm and get up early to go to a job that I hated. It always seemed like I never got enough sleep and I was exhausted every morning.
All I wanted to do was lay in bed for 10 more minutes. I’d be so tired that if somebody told me that I didn’t have to go to work that day, I could have slept for 4 more hours.
But now after having changed my circadian rhythm and having completely changed every aspect of my life I wake up refreshed and ready to tackle the day.
So I’m going to share with you some tips I’ve used to help you get out of bed quickly in the morning.
The Wrong Way To Get Out of Bed In The Morning
The wrong way is going to be always tied to using will power. Forcing yourself to make a decision to do something when the alarm goes off at 5:30am just doesn’t work. We’re not thinking with the same rational thought patterns in the early morning like we were at 8pm the night before.
What you want to do is think of the proverbial story of Pavlov’s Dog. It goes as follows…
The Pavlovian response, also known as classical conditioning, is a learning process first described by Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist. In his famous experiments, Pavlov demonstrated that dogs could learn to associate a neutral stimulus, like the sound of a bell, with an automatic behavior, such as salivating, when the bell was repeatedly paired with the presentation of food. Over time, the dogs began to salivate in response to the bell alone, even when no food was presented. This process illustrates how a conditioned stimulus (the bell) linked with an unconditioned stimulus (food) can lead to a conditioned response (salivation), showcasing a fundamental method of learning through association. This concept has broad applications, ranging from behavioral psychology to understanding various human behaviors and disorders.
This is what you want to do. You want to make getting out of bed a subconscious decision that happens automatically with no internal debate. This is discussed in detail by James Clear in Atomic Habits.
The Correct Way To Get Out of Bed In The Morning
Avoid trying to think clearly in the morning. You want to tap into your subconscious mind. You are Pavlov’s dog and your alarm clock is the bell. You want immediate action to be taken on your part (the getting out of bed bit) with zero internal debate or dialogue. It’s just something that happens automatically.
When my wife cleans one of our dog’s ears, she’ll immediately start licking her lips the entire time. It’s just a programmed response that happens with no thought.
What you want to do is to pick something in your life that you can do during the day that happens after some kind of stimulus. One that worked for me was setting a countdown timer and every 30 minutes it would go off. When it did, I would immediately get out of my chair and stand up.
I still do this today. When the alarm goes off, I’ll get up, twist my back and crack it. Then sit back down again. It really doesn’t matter what you do, all that matters is that immediately when hearing that alarm going off, you get up.
The added benefit to this is that it gets you out of your chair and allows for better blood flow and circulation to happen.
On a typical workday I’ll get up when hearing the alarm go off roughly 10 to 15 times.
The key with this is immediate action with no thought. There’s no thought in my head about whether or not I get up. It’s immediate.
This is going to build grooves in the neuronal connections in your brain that will be laid down over time. Eventually those groves will become deeper and deeper as you continue to take thoughtless action.
Sometimes I’ll get up immediately when the alarm goes off and there’s a split second as to whether or not I should get up first or turn the alarm off first. If this happens, I feel like I’ve lost. What I need to do is get up immediately with no thought.
Stimulus —> Action (no thought).
If I do this then I consider that “get up” session a success. If I have a split second thought about whether or not to turn the alarm off or lower the volume first (or whatever the case) I feel like I’ve lost.
In order for me to feel like that “stimulus —-> action” event was successful is if there was no thought.
It’s similar to what they do in movies like Zoolander (one of my favorite movies ever). They’re training Derrick Zoolander to take action against the Prime Minister of “Micronesia” when the song “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood starts playing.
If you do this for 7 days in a row, you will have had a stimulus and action event (getting out of your chair when the alarm goes off) 70 times. By this point, you’ll be able to have the same action being taken in the morning to get out of bed when your alarm clock goes off.
Some other considerations for getting out of bed early when your alarm goes off include…
The Importance of Feeling Rested Upon Waking
The more rested you feel, the easier it’ll be to get out of bed. Even though by retraining your subconscious mind to take action based on a sound, you’ll still feel physical sensations. There’s no getting around feeling tired.
For example, this has happened to me…
When the alarm went off in the morning, I immediately get out of bed based on retraining my subconscious mind. I stood next to my bed, exhausted thinking “what the hell did I just do? I could lay back down for just a few more minutes“.
A few times I did that because I was so tired.
I didn’t do all the daily rituals back then that I do now and I went to bed too late. As a result I ended up falling back asleep for 2 more hours.
Ugh.
You really need to place more priority on your sleep if you want to feel rested in the morning. Every action you take during the day, should contribute to your sleep that night.
General Tips To Improve Sleep
- At all costs avoid alcohol the night before.
- Watch the sunrise in the morning
- Avoid eating after sunset
- Avoid blue light by wearing blue blocking glasses
- Use special software to reduce blue light on your computer
- Avoid blue lit phones
- Take melatonin but you have to do it correctly
- Exercise outside (take a walk, keep it simple)
- Avoid sunglasses
- No water after 8pm
- Turn your bedroom into a sleep sanctuary.
Drink Water Immediately Upon Waking
This is a wake up tip that helped me. Before I go to bed at night one of the items I put on my nightstand is a mason jar (usually that’s 32 oz of filtered water with added minerals) full of water. I’ll also put 3 capsules of nattokinase (a proteolytic enzyme that eats up scar tissue) next to my water. These enzymes need to be taken away from food on an empty stomach.
Because of this I usually take 3 before bed and 3 when I wake up.
I drink this much water immediately upon waking primarily because you’re most dehydrated upon waking. It’s the perfect time to rehydrate yourself at the cellular level. But the other benefit in terms of getting out of bed is two fold.
- You have to be sitting up to drink that much water so that means you have to get out of bed and stand up. Standing up helps you to be more awakened as a result.
- Drinking that much water will itself activate your nervous system but also on a mechanical level, make you pee relatively quickly after drinking it. This means you will not be falling back asleep (if you get back into bed that is) for 2 more hours.
Move Your Alarm Clock?
The age old advice for how do you get out of bed in the morning is to simply move your alarm clock to the other side of the bedroom. I generally don’t recommend alarm clocks. The reason is that it increases internal stress mechanisms. The hormones dopamine and cortisol get released immediately upon seeing the numbers.
First you get a dopamine rush because you itched a curiosity. You overcame an obstacle which was wanting to know the time. Then when you internalize what knowing the time means, to the rest of your night you become stressed about it. At that time cortisol rises too early, which can keep you awake.
On top of that the color of the light that’s emitted by alarm clocks matters. We should have zero light in our bedroom. Even a small light from a device can inhibit melatonin production. If you must have a digital alarm clock, I’d get a red one and then add some Junk Light Dots over the top of them just to make sure specific wavelengths are not being emitted.
I’d recommend you get rid of your alarm clock and tap into building a circadian lifestyle that’s tightly woven to nature where you go to bed and wake up at the same time every day.
The human body loves regularity.
Conclusion
How you get out of bed in the morning says a lot about how you overcome adversity and how much you’re able to reprogram your subconscious mind to overcome obstacles in your life. If you do find it difficult to get out of a warm cozy bed in the morning I would invite you to spend 7 days doing the things I taught above.
I like the 30 minute daily alarm thing because it’s easy, and it happens almost a dozen times per day. The more it happens, the quicker you’ll stimulate the Pavlovian response trigger.
Questions:
- How long does it take you to get out of bed currently?
- Are you excited to get out of bed or do you dread it?
- When you get out of bed, are you tired or full of energy?
- What do you hate about getting out of bed?
Comment below.
