If you want to become a morning person... The real solution is not to force your body to wake up at an earlier time. The solution is to force your body to go to sleep at an earlier time. This is hard to do for a night person. Here's what I suggest: Determine what time you currently go to sleep and what time would you enjoy waking up. Use this to determine how many hours of sleeep your body wants. Example: If you go to sleep at 2 a.m. and would like to wake at 9:30, your body wants 7.5 hours of sleep. Use the info from 1) to determine your target bedtime (NOT wake-up time). If your body wants 8 hours of sleep, and you want to naturally wake up at 6 am, your target bedtime is gonna be 10 pm (like it or not). If you are able to do so, don't go cold-turkey. Don't try to force yourself to wake up 3 hours earlier than your body currently wants. This will make you feel like you're getting beat-up every morning. Give yourself a bedtime. Do not set your bedtime to be earlier thatn normal (at first). If you normall go to bed between midnight and 1:30, set a specific bedtime around there and follow it. You must follow this bedtime religiously, and when you go to bed, you must go to sleep. Try to find a system that will slow down your mind and help you fall asleep. At first, do not make your bedtime early - leave it late. Whatever time was determined in step 1) should indicate which time you'll start waking up naturally. After following your bedtime for a week or so, set your bedtime to be 30 minutes earlier. If you were sleeping at midnight, change your bedtime to 11:30. Follow this bedtime religiously until it becomes natural for you and you start feeling sleepy at aroung that time. This may take a while, but you must stick to your bedtime. When you eventually become comfortable with your adjusted bedtime, adjust it again to another 30 minutes eariler. Again, follow it religiously and give your body time to adjust. Continue to do this. Eventually, you will start to approach your target bedtime. When you reach that bedtime, your body will start to wake itself up naturally early in the morning. Remove all caffiene, sodas, teas, and energy drinks from your diet. They may be a short-term fix, but in the long-term they mess with your sleep schedule more than they help it. I cannot emphasize this enough - you will not succeed in changing the steps above if you drink this stuff. Three meals a day (yes, three) of a good diet and adequate exercise help immensely. They're not a dealbreaker (as number 6 above), but it really helps a lot. Mental exercise: stop telling yourself that you hate mornings. You don't have to start liking them. Just don't talk yourself into it. Like, if you're feeling sick and you keep moaning and wailing about how sick you are, you'll stay sick longer than if you take your mind off it and think about other stuff. The same applies here. Don't think of 7:00 am as "way too early." If you're trying to be a morning person, 5 am is not too early, and you need to mentally embrace that.[/list=1]Some things to know: You must guide your mind into giving up the things you enjoy at night. Nighttime is great for adults. After work, and after the day is done, you want to give this time to yourself, surf the net, read, watch TV (night time is when the really good, trashy television is on). Or maybe you enjoy going out to a bar, sports bar, or pool hall, having drinks with friends. Before you follow the steps above you must emotionally accept that you are going to sacrifice these things in order to gain other things in your life (an energetic early morning). There are some people who only need four hours of sleep. But most of the morning people I have known are already sleeping like a rock long before 11 pm. You have to be mentally prepared to do so as well. I'm still working on mine. I've shaved my bedtime down from 3 or 4 am to around 11:30 or midnight. I now start feeling sleepy at around this time. Unfortunately, once or twice a month I still stay awake til 2 am. But I'm improving, and hope to reach my target of 10:30 pm. I hope this helps -- droxford
That makes 2 of us weiro's. I can't sleep past 9am, even after a late gig the night before. It doesn't really matter what time I get to bed. I just have to be up by 9 for some reason. It's really strange. During the week, I find it hard to physically get out of bed, but once I do, I OK for the rest of the day. When I get home, I'll take a good 30 minute nap (usually while watching Seinfeld ) in my recliner. When I go to bed at night, I usually fall asleep before midnight. One thing I do NOT like is people bugging me at work when I first get here. I have to have a good half hour of alone time so I can check my email, check my 401K performance, check the Chronicle webpage, and of course check the bbs! Until I get all that done, LEAVE ME ALONE!!!!
Reason to be a night owl Cooler Temparatures No Traffic I prefer it Reasons to be an early bird 99% of jobs reqire it nothing's open at night It's stupid to shove 80-85% of the cities population on to the roads at on time. Pkus it shortens our lives, at my last job, thankfully I now work less than ten minutes from home, but at my last job it would take me twelve hours to work an eight hour day. On the road at 6:30 and home by 6:30, not counting lunch that's three hours a day that i'm giving away in order to earn, and that's everyday; a total of around 30 days a year spent driving in bumper to bumper smog producing traffic.
That is EXACTLY how I feel. I don't mind BEING up in the morning so much as GETTING up. I cannot play music before about noon. I've had to do it a few times and it just sucked. I usually get up around 8am most days. I'm not big on sleeping until noon anymore. I usually just feel sick when I do. I prefer to go to bed between midnight and 1am and get up between 8 and 9. If I am up later (to 3am or 4am after gigs), I try to get up at 9 anyway just to keep my schedule and keep me from feeling like crap. But, I have never been good at getting up before 8am. It sucks!
I've given up on 8 hours sleep. I get up at 6:30, and go to bed at 1 or 2 (usually closer to 2) depending on the day. I just don't feel tired before that. Naps work wonders, and I use the weekends to catch up on sleep as well. Still, it takes me an hour + in the mornings before I feel remotely functional.
Here's another sleep question. Does anyone else have a hard time sleeping on Sunday nights? I've had that problem my entire life. It's a rare Sunday that I don't lay in bed for a couple of hours before I finally drift off to sleep. I guess it's just my mind racing about the upcoming week or the past weekend. I think of some weird **** too while I'm trying to fall to sleep. For example, last night, I got to thinking that the letter C probably has the best historical sports teams. NBA-Celtics, NFL-Cowboys, NHL-Canadiens, MLB-Cardinals. I need pills.
Oh... and I've even gotten to the point that if I stay in bed past 6am (even on weekends), I feel guily and filthy because all I can think about is getting bed sores for being in bed so late. I don't take naps either. I haven't taken a nap since I was a baby. I feel guilty for wasting hours of the day asleep when I could be doing something productive. Basically, sleeps gets in the way of my life and I hate it. Yeah, I'm f'ed in the head...
I probably have one of the weirdest sleeping systems on this board. If I had my way and work didn't get in the way, I'd go to sleep later and later each night. That's because I still need about 8 hours of sleep but when I get a full night's sleep then I can and will stay up for 18-19 hours. But if I don't get a full nights sleep, I'll get tired and have to take naps. But if I take a nap then I won't be able to get to sleep that night. The best case scenario for me is to get not enough sleep during the week, but to not get the chance to nap because I have night classes or something. Then on the weekend I pull a couple of 13 hour sleep session or something. And sometimes, when my sleep cycle gets out of wack, I decide to pull an all-nighter to realign it. So if I've been sleeping really late at like 3 or 4 am, then I might just stay up all the way for about 28-29 hours, get home at about 6-7pm and crash for 11-12 hours until morning. Occasionally, I just wake up or stay up on adrenalin when I'm really excited about something. Those aren't so bad if I wake up early, but if it's keeping me up awake than that can be a problem. And my body absolutely goes crazy when I get too much caffiene. One time when I tried to wake up by taking caffiene pills, it drove me nuts all day long and at the end of the night I was still up in this bizarre, jittery, jumping jack frenzy that wouldn't allow me to relax. Seriously, if I ever took speed or other ampetamines, you'd have to scrape me off the ceiling of a movie theater. In fact, I drank coffee for the first time in a long time this morning, and I feel so jittery it's almost scary. I can usually take a cup or two (there was a stretch where I was drinking coffee everyday without problems), but maybe this is due to the fact that I've gone without coffee for so long. Still it's pretty strange because I drink cola practically everyday.
I have had minor issues with insomnia on and off and I have found Tylenol PM to be very effective and have also found that it doesn't leave me groggy in the morning. My normal work schedule is 7-4, so my alarm goes off at 5:30 (if the baby doesn't wake me up before then). I am generally a zombie until 10 or so, so I figure it is better to be a zombie on the road or at work so that the majority of my "awake and aware" time is spent with my family rather than at work.
For some reason cafene like cofee and coke don't really keep me alert in the morning and actually make me feel more tired. A glass of orange juice and toast works better for me to stay alert.
This is all true. I suffer from a bit of insomnia and this is sound advice. I used to go to bed at 4 to 5 am simply because I couldn't set myself straight. Now I wake up at 6 30 AM. It took a while but the process in how to do it is explained by droxford. The trick is not to wake up real early, but to go to bed real early! The problem with this though, is that for someone with insomnia (or just being a night person), you can't go to bed earlier than usual. But I discovered the remedy of this recently and this is my secret to waking up for work. There's this natural herb called MELATONIN that you can buy at any pharmacy. Buy Melatonin at 3 MG. It will help you sleep 30 min after you take it and its natural and it won't leave you groggy in the morning at all. (Some brands that aren't as good will leave you groggy though. I recommend the Melatonin made by Schiff, you can order it online for cheap if you like.) If you have problems with sleep or waking up on time, Melatonin will completely save you. I had a summer internship which I had to be there at 8 am, and I could not change my sleep schedule for the life of me... so instead of going to bed at 5 am, I would try to stay up till 8 am for work and make it through the day till 4 PM in which I'd finally get some sleep. Needless to say, this was a horrible way to live. Then I was introduced to melatonin and tried it and it has worked wonders. I now go to bed at 10 30 PM and wake up at 6 30 for 8 AM work, and I'm not groggy in the morning because I have become used to waking up at that time. People at work notice that I'm not a zombie anymore, work faster, think better etc. Anyways, I hope this may help. Once again, if you take up my advice, I suggest you get Melatonin 3 MG made by Schiff, which you can buy online or could find at HEB I bet.
For three years in a row when I was in college, I had upright bass lessons at the opposite end of campus at 7 in the morning... My teacher was a retired Coast Guard guy, so he was used to being up that early, but playing fast bebop before I'm even awake... there should have been a law against that.
That is just wrong. There are so many things wrong with this, I can't even begin to list all of them.
Sleep is fun. But only at certain times. I have trouble going to bed Sunday night; I would probably be able to sleep, but it's just getting there. You're in the middle of something else and all of a sudden - oops, I really need to take care of (something or other) before tomorrow. Then it's 2 a.m. or later. Oops, I have to be up at 7 or 8. Oh well. There goes the week already. Naps are fun. But sometimes your schedule doesn't allow quite a large enough gap to take one. I was going to handle this year by sleeping a lot Friday through Sunday and not that much the rest of the week. It's probably what will end up happening anyway. Not sure of the overall effect though. I wonder if I get depressed when I don't sleep.
Oh man, I just tried the power nap thing you guys talking about, it's even harder to wake up from the power nap, and I felt horrible after I woke up. Man, not gonna try that again.
Are you sure it was a POWER nap and not a 3 hour nap. The key is to keep it under 30 min (I prefer 15) and you will feel refreshed...
