A very useful advice from the "40 Sleep Hacks" from Sleepwarrior:
"Whether you wake up from SWS (Slow Wave Sleep, or deep sleep) or just have a hard time getting up, you can’t trust yourself to be rational at this time. Self-discipline does not work in a cognitive fog. If you have the habit of pressing the snooze button in the morning, it’s not because you lack self-discipline. It’s because even if you did have self-discipline, the self-discipline wouldn’t work in your unconscious fog.
Upon waking up you rely heavily on habits and automation. Spend a few minutes during the day to program proper wake-up habits into your psychology’s auto-pilot system. The procedure:
1. Start by following your bedtime routine – brush teeth, put on pajamas, etc.
2. Lay down in bed, set alarm for 5 minutes later.
3. Relax, pretend to fall asleep.
4. When the alarm goes off, immediately sit up, turn it off, take in a deep
breath, then jump out of bed.
5. Walk out of the bedroom.
6. Repeat this a few times for the next few days.
If you do this correctly, you brain will be trained to follow a routine upon hearing the alarm. You’ll wake up on auto pilot, no matter how tired you are. Works eerily well. Kinda scares me to realize our brains thrive on automation, and not so much on things like... you know... free will and self-discipline."
Steve Pavlina also talks about this in another post, and I did it for a month to train myself to get up at 345am, which I did with 99% consistency for the next 4.5 months [1]. Starting in Jan, I've been getting up at 430am instead, but this technique of training your subconscious is one of the most effective hacks I've ever tried.
you brain will be trained to follow a routine upon hearing the alarm. You’ll wake up on auto pilot, no matter how tired you are.
I did this every morning in high school. It also helps to immediately take a shower. I never understood why my peers would just go back to sleep and I didn't, but I suspect this is why.
I think there are many ways to jumpstart your system like you do with your shower. For me, it's a tall glass of water. I do have a (single) cup of coffee later on in the morning but right when I get up, get to my desk (work from home), i down a glass of water as I check HN, email, etc. It really starts me up.
"Whether you wake up from SWS (Slow Wave Sleep, or deep sleep) or just have a hard time getting up, you can’t trust yourself to be rational at this time. Self-discipline does not work in a cognitive fog. If you have the habit of pressing the snooze button in the morning, it’s not because you lack self-discipline. It’s because even if you did have self-discipline, the self-discipline wouldn’t work in your unconscious fog.
Upon waking up you rely heavily on habits and automation. Spend a few minutes during the day to program proper wake-up habits into your psychology’s auto-pilot system. The procedure:
1. Start by following your bedtime routine – brush teeth, put on pajamas, etc.
2. Lay down in bed, set alarm for 5 minutes later.
3. Relax, pretend to fall asleep.
4. When the alarm goes off, immediately sit up, turn it off, take in a deep breath, then jump out of bed.
5. Walk out of the bedroom.
6. Repeat this a few times for the next few days.
If you do this correctly, you brain will be trained to follow a routine upon hearing the alarm. You’ll wake up on auto pilot, no matter how tired you are. Works eerily well. Kinda scares me to realize our brains thrive on automation, and not so much on things like... you know... free will and self-discipline."
You can find it here, if you are interested: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1953834