How to wake up in the morning immediately

One of the biggest wasters of time I’ve encountered in life is sitting in bed under the covers. I’m neither fully awake or fully asleep. I’m just sitting there like a slug being unproductive. Recently I’ve taken on a few jobs and I’ve really had to manage my time better.

After wasting time sitting in bed for a few days I got fed up and came up with a few ways to fight this laziness and get up immediately.

Getting up immediately will accomplish a couple things:

You will save time. Sometimes this can be a major factor as I’ve wasted up to an hour before by just lounging in bed.

You will be more assertive. I feel like a piece of shit if I wait around in bed and it’s a horrible way to start your day.

You will feel better and more alert. Nothing gives me a charge more than starting the day off right by getting up immediately.

I’ve found that getting out of bed immediately is a great barometer to see where you are in life.

We all need sleep, but preferring to be asleep rather than being awake and living really says something about your life.

Have a reason to get up

One of the easiest and most beneficial ways to get up immediately in the morning is to have a reason to get up.

This sounds obvious, but there’s been many a day when I really had nothing going on and found myself just lounging around.

Any time that I had a legit reason to get up at a certain time, I would be motivated to get the hell out of bed and get moving.

One example I had was going on a job interview. I had to be at the place very early in the morning. When I got up I was tired, but knew I had to get moving to be on time. I had no trouble getting moving that day.

Another example was when I was going on a trip to an amusement park with friends. We were going for the full day and I again had to get up early. I was pretty amped about going though so I jumped out of bed fast.

After working a 9-5 for years I have found it completely inadequate as a reason for getting up in the morning.

I didn’t want to get out of bed because I knew that it would be one step closer to having to actually go to work.

If this is the case, you have to do everything you can to change your situation.

The Power of Energize

One of the things about sitting in bed that makes it hard to get moving is that you’re emerging from a sleep state. Usually this is a slow process because your body has to “wake up”.

It’s also possible to get up in an instant though.

The way I know this is because I’ve woken up in the middle of the night by a noise that jolts me right out of bed completely alert.

I’ve found that once I actually move out of the bed, I’m up with no problems.

The trick is to use this jolt to get out of bed when you aren’t scared by a bump in the night.

The way I do this is to yell energize.

The way I first learned of this technique is I saw a video somewhere about a guy who got up early to lift. Without any explanation the video cut to his room at 5 am. He gets up and yells, “Fuck” and rolls out of bed.

After laughing for a couple seconds, I realized that the man got out of bed immediately.

I had to tweak his idea a little bit because I thought “Fuck” was a negative thing to yell in light of a new day. So I changed it to “Energize”.

Here’s how it works:

I hear the alarm going off
I yell Energize really loud
I roll to my right to force myself out of bed

Sometimes I have to catch myself from falling out, but that’s a good thing because it provides an extra little jolt.

You don’t need to use the word Energize. You can yell anything really loud and it will work fine.

Mental Barrier

Getting out of bed immediately is very easy, but the reason we don’t do it is because of the mental barrier of leaving somewhere warm.

Every time I get out of bed, the feelings of being tired pass within a minute. All you have to do is do everything you can to quickly get on your feet and out of bed.

Think of it like taking off a band-aid.

You don’t slowly peel a band-aid off because it will cause more pain. You quickly rip them off and get it over with.

Get over the pain of getting out of bed as quick as possible and you’ll laugh at how silly you were for wanting to stay in bed.

Nuclear Option

If you are still having trouble getting out of bed after all this, it’s time to go nuclear.

As mentioned, all you have to do is just get out of bed in order to be successful. A really good way to ensure you get out of bed is to put the alarm across the room so you aren’t able to hit the snooze button.

I find the nuclear option to be undesirable because it means I can’t rely on myself to get up right away. On top of that, it’s extremely stressful to have an alarm going off in your room without the ability to turn it off.

However, sometimes drastic measures are called for.

For the nuclear option, I like to use the most obnoxious sounding alarm possible on my phone. Anything that will get me up and moving as fast as possible.

Wake up the body to wake up the mind

This isn’t neccessary to ensure that you don’t go back under the covers, but if you want an extra kick start to your day, a little exercise really does the trick.

I find that 50 to 100 reps of pushups really gets the blood moving and gets me amped for the day.

I also find that if I set my intention the night before to get out of bed and immediately drop down and do 50 reps, I am more likely to want to get out of bed and actually do it.

Another couple exercises to do would be some leg swings, body weight squats, and power poses.

Randy Orton gets it.

Call me crazy, but I like to get pissed off before attacking a new day. These exercises help.

Getting enough sleep

If you can’t get out of bed after using all of these techniques you have to reassess what you are doing.

The problem may just be a lack of sleep.

Anything under 6 hours and you are just shooting yourself in the foot long term. Getting out of bed shouldn’t be done at the expense of your health.

Aim to get 7-8 hours of solid sleep a night and you be waking up feeling refreshed.

If you can’t fit in 7-8 hours of sleep, do a time audit on yourself. Cutting corners on your sleep isn’t something you should be doing as it makes you less efficient during your waking hours and makes you unhealthy.

I’ve found that if I’m not getting enough sleep, the problem usually comes from not going to bed early enough.

This was the result of not wanting to get up the next day because I knew if I went to sleep I would eventually wake up and have to go to work.

This refers back to point 1