There are a lot of people who just don’t sleep at night. They stay awake until 2 a.m., 3 a.m. some even push it to 4 a.m.. These group of people are called Night Owls and I was one of them. For the past 6 Years of my life, I have been sleeping extremely late at night. There were some nights when I used to sleep at 5 (In the morning). Not only that, when I was in high school, I used to sleep after 2 a.m. and wake up at 6 in the morning and used to feel sleepy all day long. I also loved weekends. You might say that everyone loves weekends. Well, everyone loves weekends because they can chill out and watch Netflix or they can go out for shopping, I loved weekends because I got to sleep.
You might have guessed by now, I wasn’t that good at school because I felt sleepy in the classes. I spent most of the classes sleeping. By the way, I never got caught while sleeping in the class so that is a skill I have. You know what, if you want to get some tips, Just Email me. Anyways, it was a bad experience.
After my high school, I had some time which I spent by my self and did some self analysis. I also started reading some self help books and almost every book told that in order to live healthy, you have to follow the old saying, “Early to bed, early to rise. Makes the person healthy, wealthy and wise.” These books gave me a lot of motivation to fix my sleep pattern and start waking up early in the morning. However, I would like to give a shoutout to two books that have the biggest role in putting me to sleep.
- The 5 A.M. Revolution — Dan Luca
- Why We Sleep? — Matthew Walker
Both of these books go into incredible depths of the science of sleep and motivate you to get a full night sleep. If you want to read my reviews on both of these books, you should visit my blog gurmansinghh.com Here you will not only find the reviews of the books I read, you will also find some really interesting topics just like the one you are reading right now.
After reading these books, I was ready to sleep and wake up at 5 A.M the next morning. Now here is the thing. I wanted to get more than 8 hours of bed time in order to say that I am getting healthy sleep and for that I have to hit the bed at 9 P.M. Which is not an easy task as 9 P.M is just to early. You not only have to sacrifice your free time, but you also have to sacrifice your family time which I really didn’t wanted to do so I decided to hit the bed at 10 P.M which would get me 7 hours of sleep which is not bad.
Everything was going smoothly, I successfully reached the bed at 10 and then I was introduced to the next issue. I couldn’t get to sleep. Turns out that I underrated the brain’s circadian rhythm and thought that changing the sleep cycle would be as easy as taking a sip of a cold coffee in a hot day.
Soon I realized that waking up early is not a problem. The problem is sleeping early.
So there are few things that you realize a bit later. Firstly, you think of a task and say that alright, its easy but then you realize that its not. This is because when you are just thinking about the task, you are seeing how are going to get to your goal and what you are going to feel when you finally accomplish that. But when you are actually doing the task, that is the moment you get to know it’s difficulty. This is the basic human psychology. So that’s a really big hurdle that will come your way. It came in mine too. And the thing is, you will get highly demotivated when you will not be able to get to sleep. Then you will look for your phone and then start searching for the ways to get to sleep.
Doing this will make you more anxious and will make you feel awake even more. This is exactly what happened with me and there are some ways that will help you in getting to sleep.
- Don’t Look at the clock
The first thing you will do out of curiosity is that you will look for the clock and will think about the hours left for you too sleep. This will only make you more and more anxious. The thing we are avoiding here is anxiety. So we have to avoid all the anxiety provoking things.
2. Get Up
If you have been on the bed and trying to get to sleep from a long time, get up and do something boring. Like sitting and staring at the wall, reading a book or something like that. This will make you feel a bit sleepy.
3. Avoid Caffeine after 3 p.m.
So the worst choice that we can make in the day is to have a cup of coffee in the afternoon. Effects of Caffeine can last for about 8 hours and if you have a cup of coffee after 3 p.m., you can expect to stay active till 11 p.m. which is not good. So if you want to hit the bed before 10, avoid coffee after 3 p.m.
4. Avoid Naps after 3 p.m.
Just like the caffeine, you have to avoid naps after 3 p.m. Short naps can make your brain active for hours and chances are that you might your desired bed time because of the short nap you took in the afternoon.
How I managed to become an early bird from a night owl?
Now that you know the basics, let me tell you my experience so that you can learn from that and successfully transform yourself. So as I told you earlier also, my sleep schedule was pretty messed up and fixing it wasn’t easy. It took me a lot of determination and hard work to achieve this transformation.
Here is the thing, this transformation takes motivation and determination. If you are not determined, then you will fail eventually. There are many things that will distract you from your goal. The most important and difficult sacrifice is family time. In my family, no one wakes up early. They stay up until 12 a.m. So when I decided to opt the ideology of early to bed and early to rise, I had to sacrifice a lot of family time which felt bad initially but I managed to catch up with them in the morning right after they woke up.
Using Do Not Disturb
Talking about other distractions, we have your phone. Your phone is possibly the biggest distraction. You get notifications and you will get up to check them eventually. Even if you force yourself to not to look at those notifications, your brain will stay diverted from the sleep will roam around those notifications. You will be constantly thinking about what it could be. The best way to fix this problem is by not receiving the notifications at all. How you may ask? Well there is a feature in every modern smartphone these days which is called “Do Not Disturb”. You can find that in your phone’s settings. Just schedule it to turn off notifications after a specified time and trust me, it works wonders. Not only this, you can also set it to turn off automatically after a desired time.
I personally use Do no Disturb on my phone and I am very happy with. After 10 p.m., all the notifications are blocked and I don’t feel the urge to check my phone when I am trying to get to sleep.
Using Night Mode
Let’s talk about blue light for a minute. You might have read somewhere that blue light is bad for sleep. Well it actually is. Our brain relates blue light with wakefulness. So when you look at your phone, computer or television, our brain does not releases the chemical called melatonin which is necessary getting to sleep. Using night mode on your phone changes the color tone of the display which does not displays the blue light and makes the display warmer in color. This does not interferes with the melatonin release and in turn, makes us feel sleepy.
Turning off all the lights
This is very important. I had a lot of issues with this in the start as my family is not into going to bed early. So, lights used to stay turned on all the time. Due to this, I had hard time going to sleep. But the solution to this is getting a eye mask. Getting an eye mask works wonders if you are not able to get a pitch black room.
Setting aside the distractions
This is the most important step. You will not be able to sleep with racing thoughts. You have to calm your brain down getting it ready to get to sleep. One of the most thought provoking things are your gadgets. Even though you have blocked the notifications and you have turned on the night mode, but your phone is still there in your hand and you can easily access the applications. Applications are designed to be addictive. Developers want maximize your time on their applications and they do that by showing you what you want to see. Will explain this in depth in the future article. Right now, you just need to put your phone aside in order to block unwanted thoughts from keeping you awake.
Listen To Music
Now this might sound a bit contradicting. I just told you to keep your phone aside and now I am asking you to listen to music. Well here is the thing, nowadays everyone has a pair of Bluetooth earphones (Thanks to companies removing headphone jacks from the phones). You just need to play your favorite playlist and lie on your bed. Being wireless, you don’t even have to worry about keeping your phone around.
Sleep Hypnosis
Sleep hypnosis is one of the most effective sleep methods I have ever tried.
I tried this personally and it works wonders. There are many apps that are designed to get you to sleep but most of them require you to sign up for a subscription. But we live in an era where we have YouTube and a number of awesome creators. Just by searching sleep hypnosis, you are going to find many video sessions of more than 40 minutes. I would recommend you to search for Michael Sealey. On his channel, you are going to find tons of sleep hypnosis videos which will not only help you sleep but will also relax you deeply. Trust me, you are going to get addicted to his video sessions.
These are the things that you have to do in order to get to get to sleep.
Now let’s talk about the common problems that you will face along the way. I faced these problems too and found that there are many who face exactly the same problems. Making matters worse, these problems can even make you feel less motivated about making this new change in your life.
Sleeplessness
Well this is the most common problem people face when they are planning to wake up early in the morning. If you have been staying up late at night, then your brain is programmed to sleep late. Our brains have a circadian rhythm which can be called as a 24 hour clock that regulates sleep hormone, melatonin. When you decide to start waking up early in the morning, our brain is simply not ready. For your brain, bed time is still hours ahead. So in order to fix this, you have to make yourself tired the next day. To do this, you have to get to sleep whenever you feel sleepy and wake up at your desired early morning time. Trust me, you are going to feel tired and unproductive.
By doing this, you are much more likely to get to sleep early. This will also fix 50% of your sleep cycle. But there will be some nights when you will not feel tired. In that case, you have to let yourself relax and try to sleep. If you find yourself awake after 25 minutes, then get up and do something boring. Chances are that your brain associates being in bed with your older late night activities such as watching movies, surfing the web etc. In order to fix this, only get to bed when you are feeling sleepy. Doing this will reprogram your brain.
Waking up in the middle of the night
When I was making this habit, this problem was a nightmare for me. What happens is after getting to sleep, you suddenly wake up and after that getting back to sleep feels like climbing Mount Everest. Well, fixing this is also very simple, if you are unable to get to sleep after 25 minutes, get up and do something boring and only get to bed when you are feeling sleepy.
Bad Quality of Sleep
Well we know that we have to sleep for at least 8 hours. But that is the quantity side of things, we cannot forget the quantity. In the initial days of changing your habit, you will wake up many times in the middle of the night. This is because when you are motivated to wake up early, your subconscious mind makes sure that you wake up. This is the reason that you are more likely to become aware that your alarm is about to ring moments before it actually does.
Now this is bad for your sleep quality. If you are becoming aware of your surrounding or you are waking up multiple times in the middle of the night, this means that you are coming out of the REM sleep quite often which is not good. And in order to fix this, you have to make sure that you are sleeping in dark environment with zero disturbances. I would recommend you to sleep alone because the movements made by your partner can be the reason for you becoming aware or waking up in the middle of the night.
Well these were the problems that I faced in the initial days and you are also likely to face these if you are planning to change your sleep cycle. These problems are likely to demotivate you but make sure to follow the solutions mentioned above and you should be good. All of the things I have mentioned are based on my personal experience. I have recommended the solutions that worked for me and may work for you too.
If you are going to try this out, make sure to stay motivated and things will work as planned. It should take you about two weeks to fully blend into your new routine and become an early bird.
