It’s hard to believe that there was a point in my life where I dreaded waking up in the morning, avoided taking 8 a.m. classes and couldn’t wait for the weekends so I could sleep until noon. About a year ago, I was tired of being tired, so I started going to bed early. By going to bed early and still waking up at my normal time, I noticed that my days were too short, and 24 hours wasn’t enough time to do what I needed.
Then, I came up with a new strategy: I went to bed whenever I was tired at night, stopped worrying about the amount of hours I would be sleeping, and woke up at 6 a.m. to have a day before my day began.
The serenity of a silent morning is unlike any other part of my day. No one else is up – not even the sun – and while people are sleeping and unaware that there is a life to participate in, I’m awake and alive.
College students live a demanding and eventful life full of constant anxiety yet nothing to really anticipate other than a Friday night or just the next time you’re going to be going to sleep. Think about it: What do you do when you wake up? You hit snooze, get a pit in your stomach because your slumber is over, drag yourself to the bathroom to get ready, binge-drink coffee, eat breakfast if you’re not already running late, convince yourself to go to class, and think about when you’re going to take your nap. If that were going to be my day, of course I wouldn’t want to get up.
Waking up in the dark is not easy, but when you have a purpose and something to look forward to, starting your day becomes exciting. When I go to bed, I give myself something to get excited about. Last Wednesday, I woke up at 5 a.m. to finish this article, get ahead in my classes so that I could enjoy formal this weekend and make a good breakfast before my first class at 11. Yesterday, I got up because I wanted to journal in the morning, which I hadn’t done in a few weeks. On Mondays, I go to 6 a.m. yoga sculpt class downtown and work out with 40 other morning people.
Give yourself something to look forward to every day rather than a boring, repetitive day that you barely go through the motions of. Live a life of purpose and small goals and you’ll notice that you’ll be excited to jump into bed to get started on your next day. It’s almost 6:15, and I’ve written an article, responded to emails and I’m about to go eat a really good breakfast. I have five hours until my next class. Do you know what that feels like, to feel like you have time in your day and that you can do everything you want and still have time to watch Netflix or go work out?
I challenge you to try waking up an hour earlier than you normally do for five days. You’re going to be tired whether you wake up at 5 or you wake up to your alarm that goes off at 9 a.m. But science shows that humans actually don’t need eight hours of sleep, and that the tired feeling you have after you know you didn’t sleep for as long as you would have liked to is all in your head.
If you wake up one hour earlier from Monday-Friday next week, that’s five hours you’re adding onto your life! Let’s say you do that for a month, for 20 days. That’s 20 hours – almost a full day. You would be adding almost an entire day to your life every month if you woke up a little bit earlier. Let’s get dramatic and say you did that for a year (that’s not healthy and I don’t recommend it). You’re adding almost two weeks to your life.
What could you do with all of that extra time you’re adding to your life? You could pick a new hobby, develop a new talent, read so many good books, or develop more self-awareness. You could add more to your life if you just became a morning person. Five days is the challenge. You’ll notice a difference in your happiness, your relationships and your musings on life.
