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7 Habits & Tricks to Wake You Up in the Morning

Eric Isaacson

Eric Isaacson

The effectiveness of your whole day can pivot on your morning routine, yet so many of us struggle to simply wake up. There’s a lot of reasons that rolling out of bed can be difficult and a lot of other tricks people have invented to be able to do it, day after day. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it compiles several of the tricks I’ve employed to wake up, get up, and get going.

Good Habits

Here’s a few ideas of things that are tried and true ways to wake up healthy and get your day going right. You can make a habit of these and they’ll never lose their effectiveness.

1. Don’t snooze

When you snooze, it actually messes with your sleep cycle in a way that actually makes you more tired. If you were to wake up the first time your alarm went off, you would wake up feeling more rested than after getting the extra 5, then 10, then 15 minutes of sleep. Many alarm apps allow you to remove the snooze option. If you have a physical alarm, consider removing the snooze button altogether. Just wake up.

2. Know exactly what you’re going to do after getting up

Do you ever lay in bed thinking about what you need to do and then fall back to sleep? Don’t do that. Now think about the last time you planned something you were going to do the next day. You wanted to make sure you could be quick in the morning so before you went to bed, you thought through each step and how it would go and then the next morning, like magic, you actually woke up.

You don’t have to plan your whole day. Just take a minute the night before and plan the first 5-15 minutes and visualize what that will look like. This seems pretty simple but this little mental trick, if done well enough, can actually eliminate your need for an alarm clock altogether. You will just naturally wake up to do what you visualized doing.

3. Drink a glass of water immediately after waking up

Skip the coffee. There’s a healthy substitute that takes no time to brew, has no calories, and costs almost nothing. Not only is drinking water when you wake up a refreshing way to come to life, it also jumpstarts your metabolism and flushes toxins from your body. For more information, check out David Wolfe’s article Drink Water First Thing in the Morning for These 5 Reasons!

Good Tricks

Everything can get easier once you form the habit. Sometimes it takes a little more to snap you out of your struggling routine. Not every trick works for everybody but don’t be afraid to try a new one, even if it’s weird. You might find one that works for you that seemed way too off the wall to even try. Because these are simply great tricks, they may lose get stale and lose their effectiveness over time. Make sure to change them up and seek for healthy habits that will endure.

4. Set your alarm clock away from your bed

It’s far too easy to turn off an alarm clock that’s within arm’s reach, even if you’re not awake. Set your alarm clock somewhere else such as across the room. You can even get extra creative and put it on the other side of a few things making somewhat of an obstacle course. This works even better if there’s somebody else in earshot of your alarm that you don’t want to wake up; you have to make a mad dash to shut the alarm off and it really get’s your blood flowing.

5. Try a more creative alarm clock

  • Alarm Clock Plus is mostly a free basic alarm clock but it has several options to make complex it pretty complex if you like. It has strobe lights, gradual volume increases, and even an option to do math to disable the alarm. Just be careful the difficulty level of math you set is one that you can actually handle first thing in the morning.
  • BioBrite Sunrise Clock gradually glows brighter and brighter and acts like your own minisunrise, so you will no longer be jerked awake by jarring noises.
  • SpinMe is an app that will only turn off if you get out of bed and spin around two times. You’ll be hard pressed to find anything as effective as this tool.

6. Set your alarm with an inspiring ringtone

Consider waking up to the theme song from Rocky or a mashup of inspiring statements. This one works great at helping you feel pumped to be awake. My guess is you’re visualizing yourself waking up the Rocky theme right now. You’re off to a good start already.

7. Wake up laughing

Morning’s don’t have to be mundane or difficult. Consider Zig Ziglar’s advice and wake up ready to enjoy your day.

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