Tricks for Getting Out of Bed in the Morning | Hacker News Reader

Tricks for Getting Out of Bed in the Morning

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I don't get much from productivity "tricks". I get excited for a little while, but the excitement wears off a week, maybe a few days later, and I'm back where I started.

The best long-term advice I know is to just do it fucking now. If you have to get up, then get out of the bed and get ready, whether you feel like it or not. It's not what you wanted to hear, but maybe you'll feel better hearing it from Paul Graham:

"But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right."

Couldn't agree more, although some of the suggestions make sense.

The best way to get out of bed, and to make it easier, is to have something decent to get out of bed for, and to know that the night before (point 6).

Flight I need to be up at 6am for? No problem getting up at 5.

Exciting day at work? Up at 8 no worries.

Also recognize your internal body clock's desired times (which I suppose is point 1). 1am-9am is my preferred sleep time, and although I can temporarily get around it, it's easier to adapt my schedule. Who wants to feel tired all the time?

I trutly believe (after going through so many such "tricks/hacks") that you can never motivate yourself to enjoy something you "must" do unless you somehow make into something you "want" to do, and then follow it up with specific reasons.

Rather than saying to yourself "I must wake up at 7", why not say "I want to wake up at at 6 so that I can take my time and get ready for work at an easy pace"?

What I'm trying to get at here is that if you find yourself not wanting to do something, or running away from something you "must" do, then there's a real, deeper reason why you feel that way. In the meantime, such "hacks"/etc are only a bandaid solution and you'll be going throught he same cycle over and over again.

I don't really understand the obsession with getting up in the morning. When everyone else is awake, they just distract me into not working. When everyone is asleep, it's dark out, and everything is closed, there's nothing to do but work.

I can't think of one useful thing I've ever done during the day, actually...

Since you're now asleep, I'm free to trash your comment here and accuse you of all sorts of bad behavior, and I have 12 hours to get away with it :)

The real trick is to never have to get out of bed in the morning.

Winston Churchill - in the years until he became prime minister: "Despite all this activity Churchill’s daily routine changed little during these years. He awoke about 7:30 a.m. and remained in bed for a substantial breakfast and reading of mail and all the national newspapers. For the next couple of hours, still in bed, he worked, dictating to his secretaries.

At 11:00 a.m., he arose, bathed, and perhaps took a walk around the garden"

Descartes was accustomed to working in bed until noon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes

Even in his portrait René Descartes looks somnolent.

I envy you.

On the side, 3 and 8 work incredibly well. I sleep on the top bunk and so I have to jump out of bed just to disable an alarm, or else my roommate starts kicking me through the bedsheet. It's a motivator, all right. And I wake up much faster on a day after a work-out session. I've been doing P90X for a little while now, and while it hurts like hell, the next day I wake up bursting with energy. It's great.

I have found that I am dead in the morning after a really hard day of rock climbing. Maybe it is because I am usually sore all over my body.

Climbing is different from typical gym workouts. It puts far more stress on your tendons than your muscles, and tends to exert injurious forces on your muscles when it does work on them. Tendons take longer to heal than muscles.

Plus, most climbers have a series of rapid warm-up and cool-down cycles -- climb, stop, belay, climb, stop, etc. -- which doesn't get the heart rate going the same way that an extended aerobic workout does.

Your climbing will tend to improve if instead of climbing a few hard routes, you climb a bunch of routes about one full grade below your maximum ability. Bonus points if you can score a belayer that doesn't mind the boring end of the rope for an entire evening. As your muscles become fatigued, your body will start trying to get lazy and sloppy, and that's where your technique will actually improve. Straining on a really hard route doesn't do anything good for technique / body position / etc.

(Former climbing instructor from Livermore. I really miss it, can you tell?)

I climb everything from 5 grades below my current level to one grade above. I have found that consciously maintaining good technique on the hard routes helps me out a lot. I don't believe in "redpointing," so I usually don't try to force myself up a really hard route that I'm having trouble on. That is how you get injured.

The soreness I get after climbing is the same kind of soreness I used to get during the first two weeks of a weight lifting routine. It is not tendon damage or severe muscle damage because it doesn't last more than a day.

My workout guarantees I am perpetually sore. It sucks for a couple weeks, but after a few months you get used to it and you actually do have more energy... though paradoxically require more sleep to recharge. As long as I hit the minimum number of hours, though, I feel like a million bucks.

That's how it's been for me too. Part of me misses feeling not-battered. The rest of me really enjoys the energy I have despite that.

I have been climbing for over a year. I still don't burst out of bed with energy in the morning.

couple of steve pavlina articles on the same topic:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-ea...

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right...

Have young children.

Yeah I laughed when I saw the headline, thinking to myself "some people need tricks to get out of bed?, how silly". My daughters wake up at 6:30 every morning, that means I'm up too no matter what. Problem solved.

I take my four-year-old to preschool in the morning, which means I have to wake him up so he can get dressed and have breakfast in time to catch the bus. Which means I have to get up before he does.

On weekends, the boy stays in bed until 8:00. Unfortunately, his brothers do not follow his example.

Same here, although I think there is a subtle distinction between "out of bed" and "awake".

I have the same problem with my wife. She wakes up at 5am!

Morning news on the radio works for me. Within 15 minutes, there's guaranteed to be something infuriating enough to make me leap out of bed in an angry funk.

I like to listen AM talk radio to keep me awake on long road trips for the exact same reason.

Does anyone else here use a computer desktop or online alarm clock, like the author?

Note/disclaimer Im curious because this is my start-up's field.

Yes! When I was on Windows, I wrote a program that starts music, pausing every few minutes to read out (using Windows's text-to-speech) the time, the weather (scraped from BBC's site; I was in England), which of my favorite blogs had updated in the last day, and any reminders I had for the day.

The program was cool enough that my girlfriend anthropomorphized it; we called the voice Grizwelda, and she had the capability to add her own reminders.

Last year I switched to Ubuntu and had some trouble with text-to-speech at first, so my current alarm clock is just a program that just tells Rhythmbox to start playing at a certain time. (I just got Festival text-to-speech working reliably today, so I'm planning to add all my old features I had in Windows days.)

I'd be very interested to hear about your startup. Put the details in your profile?

It's called http://sleep.fm & it's similar to Iron Man's alarm clock in the movie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXH2K2ZlrjQ and also to what you created!

Right now wakes you to various types of weather forecasts, time and also the day and date. We'll be adding more sounds and options too!

Please...would be great if you used our service :) Less hassle for you to create something on your own. Were all ears too for other forms of wake up communication people will find useful!

Thanks, I signed up and sent feedback. That Youtube video is marked as private so I can't view it; I thought I'd let you know in case it's something you often send to people as a demo.

Am I right in thinking this is solely a webapp at the moment? I wouldn't really want to leave my computer on overnight. Can you recommend an app for waking from hibernation ready for your service to kick in?

You could look into an Asterisk telephony solution - anywhere you have access to an asterisk server, setup a cron job to get it to ring you (and text-to-speech something to you).

Perhaps possible with http://www.twilio.com/ ?

(As a way to get information to you without leaving your computer on - but some BIOS's have a wake-on-modem option so this might work for that with some tweaking).

Sorry, I don't understand Fahrenheit.

Currently a web app but soon available on other platforms and we'll be adding Celsius soon too! Though for your forecast for today we currently speak the temperature in descriptive yet general terms...i.e. freezing temperatures with heavy snow or your forecast for today will be warm with showers.

Yes, but

a) My PC is too loud, I prefer sleeping with it (and everything else) turned off

b) I was using Citrus Alarm Clock on Windows ( http://www.ornj.net/citrus/ ), which faded in MP3s, but I woke up and turned it off within a couple of seconds, so it was rather a pointless feature. Less annoying than a loud buzzer though.

After waking up it takes me a while to boot - I could probably benefit from an audio reminder of what day it is and what I want to get up to do.

I used to do this when I had a desktop. I prefer waking up to Eye of the Tiger rather than annoying beeps. Now I generally use my iPhone, although the default selection of ringtones aren't much better.

Actually, a cool app would be an alarm that plays music from your music library. iPhone apps are sandboxed so you couldn't do this directly, but maybe you could stream it from a remote file? Hmmm...

an iphone app would have to be running and not let the phone sleep to act as an alarm clock. this is why there are no such apps in the app store. forget to run it before you sleep and it'll never work.

I have seen two or three in the app store, but you are right currently no background apps kills iPhone alarm clock innovation.

Though we do have a solution were working on!

I used to with software called awaken but I stopped ever since my macbook's fan started to spin all the time... I love silence when sleeping and fan noises go against that

Awaken is great, it gets me up every morning. You can put your Macbook to sleep and Awaken will wake it up, so you can have it turned off during the night. You can get it at http://www.embraceware.com/products/awaken/

Cool - never heard of awaken. Do you happen to have a link?

I'm surprised everyone here dances around the issue rather than using brute force.

I own 4 alarm clocks, which I set to go off at 5 minute intervals. I also stuff small wads of paper into the alarm on-off switch, to force myself to use the snooze button. 20 minutes from the first alarm, I have 4 alarms going off a few seconds apart.

I'd hate to be your S/O

Reading on the toilet can cause you to spend way more time on the toilet than you really should. Bad things can happen, especially if you have a family history of digestive problems. I'll spare you all the medical details and obligatory puns: Google it yourself.

What helped me most was having food easily available. I always have oat-shakes ready in the fridge to minimise the amount of time between the alarm going off and having enough blood sugar to think rationally.

Had to become a morning person this semester (early classes). My tactics are twofold:

Coffee by the bed. Literally within about two feet. I'm a little crazy, so I've hacked my coffee machine together, but programmable store-bought stuff works too.

iPhone by the bed. It's really bright, I hold it a few inches from my face and start going through my RSS reader. Gets my mind in gear and my pupils to contract.

I bought one of those pod coffee machines. Set it up next to my alarm clock. (In theory), when I stumble over to my alarm clock to shut it off, I just hit the button on the machine and my coffee is ready in 4 seconds.

Usually, by the time I get up to snooze it a second time, the coffee is sitting there, smelling all coffee-like (yummy). That's my Pavlovian trick.

This is my favorite HN comment ever- rushed to the kitchen and moved my coffemaker into the bedroom as soon as I read it. Can't wait to wake tomorrow and have coffee within reach!

For those who don't drink coffee: Taking even just a single sip of a carbonated beverage right after turning off the alarm has worked well for me.

actually i am more of a stick person (though not always)... so i find that reminding myself of a failure motivates... especially when its 5AM and freezing - the reminder of having to spend all my hours at a sucky job and not doing anything useful, just springs me out onto my laptop!!! and not to mention the "zone" is just brilliant...

Light is the only thing thats done it for me, ever. In high school I made myself get up and turn on a light, which was permission to go back and lie on the bed for another 15 minutes. Without light, I've never been able to get up.

The funny part is I sometimes forget this for extended periods of time and suffer awfully trying to get up in the morning.

Skin has light receptors that help the body changing states. It helped me a lot to find out this.

Light works for me too. It's also the reason why I often oversleep in hotels with heavy light-proof drapes.

I have "Wake-up Light" made by Philips, which slowly turns light on at the morning to simulate sun raising. It helps me too.

PS. But it badly designed because it power adapter produces some low noise during night, which I can hear by one ear. It display is too bright and it built-in speaker is too cheap. :-(

The low tech version that was supposedly used by native americans was to drink a lot of water the night before. I agree with "comatose_kid" though - young children are a great way to get up early - my alarm goes off at 7:15, but our daughter usually goes off about 20 minutes before hand.

Here's an interesting list of alarm clocks that might help:

http://www.uberreview.com/2006/03/top-ten-most-annoying-alar...

Sleep on the floor. Bang. You're out.

Actually this is pretty good advice. I can pretty much sleep anywhere, floors included. When I wake up in bed, the warmth and comfort prevents me from leaving. When I wake up from sleeping on the floor however, I want to leave because it isn't very comfortable.

Reasons to get out of bed early:

1. Young child as stated earlier 2. Dog that needs to go out NOW or will crap on the floor. 3. Sunlight streaming in through the East-facing window. Bonus if it's a subzero morning and I'm curious if there are sundogs. 4. Roosters crowing reminding me chickens want to be let out(I live on a farm). 5. Wife still too sleepy to be in the mood.

After all this I usually just yell at child(1) to put dog(2) outside and roll over and go back to sleep until wife(5) is awake enough :-)

Get to the shower as quickly as possible. I find that I tend to snooze or go back to sleep if I don't immediately get out of bed and go directly to the shower when my alarm goes off. If I give myself any time to think about it, any time at all, I can usually rationalize another 10-60 minutes of sleep, and then I'm done for.

On a similar note, I always place my alarm clock on the opposite side of the room, which forces me to get out of bed to stop the noise.

I've previously written two popular articles on the same topic which may also be helpful:

http://www.davecheong.com/2007/06/15/waking-up-early-15-tips...

http://www.davecheong.com/2006/06/14/waking-up-early-and-con...

These help me with early wake-ups (3:00am):

* My pre-alarm goes off 15 minutes early. After this alarm, I start thinking and worrying about what I need to do. When the real alarm sounds I'm ready to jump out of bed.

* I don't use the bathroom in the morning when I'm sleepy. A full bladder helps me stay awake.

* I nap whenever I can't work.

My problem with the "going to bed when tired" suggestion is that I've found that the most effective way to manage my ADD is to do most of my productive work after a long day because by then my brain has settled down enough to allow for extended periods of concentration.

1. Don't drink coffee, ever. Don't drink alcohol, or use any other drugs that mess with sleep.

2. Sleep in a room with lots of morning sunlight.

3. Don't use an alarm clock unless you have a hard deadline you absolutely can't miss.

4. Plan your day the night before, at least in your head.

5. Find a breakfast you enjoy.

Best thing I do is wake up and go to the bathroom or shower. I mean showering is practically sleeping anyways, white noise, quiet, warmth. Your just verticle for it.

Here's my method:

1) Remove sheets 2) Move to an upright position 3) Place feet on ground 4) Stand up

Now, if anyone could help me with falling asleep again in the shower...

If you have a programmable thermostat, set it to drop to 64 around bedtime and rise to 72 when you want to wake up.

Why?

This really does work. On a cold day my inclination is to stay underneath the covers. I've even gotten my laptop and read e-mail from quite often.

It may also be biological. Rising temperature indicates that the sun is coming up and the day is starting. On the same idea light helps. Turning on the lights can wake me up, but natural sunlight coming through the blinds is even better.

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