Greetings, friends! Today, waking up early in the morning, I once again noted that I woke up literally a couple of minutes before the alarm went off. I don't always manage to wake up without an alarm clock. To do this, certain conditions must be met and the habit of getting up early must be developed. In this article I will talk about how to get up without an alarm clock at a time that you choose. This useful and fun skill can sometimes be compared to a superpower that anyone can master with the right approach.
How we sleep
To take control of your sleep and learn how to wake up without an alarm clock, you need to have at least a superficial understanding of how we sleep, wake up and why we need to sleep.
Sleep phases
A few words about the phases of sleep. There are two phases that replace each other on average 4-5 times throughout the night:
- REM sleep phase - during this phase, active brain activity occurs. A person in this stage of sleep can be identified by rapid eye movements. Waking up from the fast phase is often accompanied by colorful dreams, which I often want to see through.
- NREM sleep is a deeper sleep during which the entire body is relaxed and brain activity is reduced.
After stress, REM sleep takes longer, and after physical fatigue, on the contrary, slow-wave sleep predominates, and you sleep deeper. They also say about such a dream, “Sleeping like a dead man.” Age also has an impact - in childhood, REM sleep predominates, but over the years, the slow-wave sleep phase takes over.
It is advisable to wake up after entering the REM sleep phase, otherwise you will feel exhausted and sleep-deprived.
How we fall asleep and wake up
The hormone melatonin helps you fall asleep, acting like a sedative and suppressing your reaction to external stimuli. Melatonin is a circadian regulator. Every day, your biological clock adjusts your body to different types of activity, depending on the time of day. And at the time you usually go to bed, melatonin begins to be released.
By morning, the release of melatonin decreases, and this promotes awakening.
It is precisely because the body gets used to a certain regime that when flying to another time zone on the planet, you may experience problems with sleep and general fatigue.
Recommendations and useful tips
- Don't use curtains that are too thick, or at least open them slightly. It is difficult for the body to wake up in complete darkness. You can buy a lamp with a timer that will turn on at a certain time.
- I think many people know that you should not drink drinks that contain caffeine in the evening. But let me remind you and clarify that many medications contain a sufficient amount of caffeine.
- Help your body by eating more bananas, eggs and nuts. They contain tryptophan, which helps set the body up for rest. By the way, there is a lot of it in milk. Remember when some of us were forced to drink a glass of warm milk before bed as children?
- Before you go to rest, repeat to yourself mentally, for example, “I will wake up at 7 am. I will wake up at 7 am." It works like the principle of affirmation, which we discussed earlier in the article “How to program yourself for success using affirmation.” The main thing is that you must clearly define for yourself what you want, excluding the options “I would like, I hope...”
- Ventilate the room more often and spend time outdoors. Daily physical activity, such as running, swimming, active games or aerobics, greatly helps improve the quality of sleep.
That's all, dear readers, follow the recommendations and over time you will learn to get full, quality sleep and wake up in the morning without an alarm clock. After all, as one popular wisdom says, “He who gets up early, God rewards him.”
How to get up without an alarm clock
Now let's move on to the practical part of this article and figure out how to get up without an alarm clock. Let's start with something simple.
Find out how many hours of sleep you need
An adult usually needs 7-9 hours, but there are exceptions.
You can record the time at which you go to bed and wake up for a week, and then calculate the arithmetic average.
Maintaining such statistics is greatly simplified by having a fitness bracelet with a sleep monitoring function. For example, I sleep on average a little over 7 hours, according to the schedule for the last month. In my case, if I want to wake up peacefully without an alarm at a certain time, it is enough to go to bed 7-8 hours before.
Stick to a Sleep Routine
In order for you to trust your biological clock, you need to tune it to work. To do this, it is enough to go to bed and wake up at the same time (if possible, of course), get enough sleep and follow the rules of healthy sleep:
- get rid of the habit of falling asleep with the TV on or with a smartphone in your hands;
- do not overeat before bed;
- do not drink coffee or alcohol before bed;
- make your bedroom comfortable, get rid of annoying sounds and light sources.
I wrote more about this in the article How to get rid of insomnia.
Stop relying only on your alarm clock
First, you need to get rid of the habit of setting the alarm clock for another 5 minutes. It happened to me that in this way I could delay waking up for more than an hour in a row, constantly waking up and snoozing the alarm. This habit prevents you from learning to get up without an alarm clock and does not help you sleep better and feel more energetic.
Secondly, try to wake up without an alarm clock. If you get up around the same time every day, try waking up yourself. If you maintain a sleep schedule and get enough sleep, you should develop the habit of sleeping through yourself. The body will already know that by this time it is time to reduce melatonin production.
Just in case, set an alarm clock, but 10-20 minutes later than usual, and on weekends you can practice without it.
Give yourself a mindset in the evening
Personally, I find this practice very fun and useful. You can choose your own time to wake up!
When I want to wake up earlier than usual, I set myself up in the evening. Closing my eyes, I imagine waking up at a certain time. I imagine my feelings, replay in my head the duration of sleep before waking up. In this way, I set the body to wake up at a certain time, mentally regulating the duration of the sleep phases. I don't know how it actually works, but it works! And the more detailed you imagine all this, the more likely and accurate the effect will be.
With practice, you can learn to wake up without an alarm, not only at the same time every day. You will understand how to get up without an alarm clock at absolutely any time you choose in the evening, and surprise yourself with your superpower to control the phases of sleep and awakening.
Biological processes
In humans, there are two biological processes that underlie our natural sleep and wake patterns. These are circadian rhythms and homeostasis.
Melinda Jackson, senior research fellow in sleep and psychology at the Royal Melbourne University of Technology in Australia, says the main principle underlying homeostasis is a signaling process regulated by the hypothalamus region of the brain. As a result, the longer we stay awake, the more we strive for sleep, and the likelihood of falling asleep increases significantly. When we fall asleep, the dream begins to dissipate. In time, the time comes to wake up.
Along with homeostasis, circadian rhythm is also controlled by cells located in the hypothalamus. At the same time, parallel processes develop that regulate the phases of drowsiness and wakefulness during the day.
This is affected by light and darkness. As a result, periods of wakefulness and sleepiness tend to correspond to morning light and night darkness.
It is likely that in ancient times people woke up due to their internal clocks as soon as the first rays of the rising sun appeared.
Bottom line
The more often you rely on yourself, the easier it will be for you to wake up without an alarm clock at any time. Train your body, learn to program your sleep phases, and you will stop depending on the alarm clock.
Friends, do you manage to wake up without an alarm clock? Or do you like to transfer it for another 5 minutes several times, trying to “get enough sleep”? If you have other tips on how to wake up without an alarm and how to wake up early, please share them in the comments!
And don’t forget that you can subscribe to blog updates and receive announcements of new materials by email.
See you again! Yours Alexander Gorokhov
Is it worth changing your lifestyle?
It's good to give advice, but it's not easy to follow it. Every person has a question: how long does it take to learn to get up early?
It’s interesting to know how long it takes in practice to change your usual routine? Entrepreneur Zdravko Cvetic tried to learn how to get up early. After that, he published all the practical materials. The author admits that he spent almost 4 years just on developing and testing advice.
The author tried all his developments on himself. I broke down, experimented again, but still managed to get up early. The entrepreneur claims that “the game was worth the candle.”
In the modern world, for some reason, they have come to believe that early means getting up at 5 am. But getting up early isn't just about 5 am. The concept of “early” is determined by the presence of family, work, hobbies, what you do, social circle, frequency of travel and many other definitions.
If a person works in shifts, then after a night shift it is difficult to sleep for 2 hours and get up at 5 or 6 in the morning. But still, every person will be able to find the daily routine for themselves in order to get up early and feel good.
First prototypes
But by the 17th and 18th centuries, the first household alarm clocks had already begun to appear. They were controlled by internal scales, which gave a signal at a predetermined time.
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At the beginning of the 19th century in Britain, wealthy families began to hire special people. They, armed with long sticks, continuously knocked on the window until the man woke up. Some used a special tube to shoot peas at their clients' windows.
Morning hydrotherapy
Showering helps you wake up and recharge, and if you do it right, a morning shower will wake you up much better than strong coffee.
The main principle: temperature change, but not shock. Start with a comfortable hot shower, and then play with the temperature, making the water a little cooler, then hotter. It is not necessary to torture yourself with a contrast shower; switching from hot water to warm, barely cool and hot again will do the job without an unpleasant temperature shock.
Salute the sun
There is a scientific explanation for the effectiveness of this ritual of yogis, which dates back thousands of years. The fact is that our body reacts to sunlight in a certain way: the production of melatonin, the sleep hormone, decreases. It is this hormone that is to blame for the drowsiness and slight weakness that we feel immediately after waking up (and, by the way, it is problems with its production that most often lead to insomnia).
In other words, a few minutes in bright light will really help you shed the remaining sleep and switch completely to wakefulness mode. You don’t have to do yogic practices (although the ritual has its own beauty and does bring peace), just get out of bed and stand in front of a window with bright natural light for a couple of minutes.
Drink water immediately after waking up
The habit of starting your day with coffee to wake up is a bad habit. Caffeine artificially excites the nervous system, after which a wave of fatigue rolls in, and by the time you get to work, you feel like you're in a fog again.
It is best to drink a glass of water (room temperature, maybe with lemon, or just water) - this is the habit that will help you wake up and give you a burst of energy, and drink coffee an hour after waking up.
