When Summertime comes around, students all over the world tell themselves “I’m so excited to SLEEEEEP,” but after 4-5 days into this cycle of 10-12 hours of sleep a night, our minds are groggy, we sleep past noon, we’re sluggish, and we can’t shake the feeling that time is slipping through our fingers. Sleep is awesome, but like most things, it feels the best to sleep when we’re not overindulging, which means that sleeping more than 8 hours a night is a quick way to devalue sleep and cause our descent into endless marathons of our next temporary tv obsession.
As someone who’s struggled with this for as long as I can remember, my problems have only increased in college just as my months off doubled from two to almost four. Four months!! So here are a few tips that I’ve been putting into practice that I’ve found helpful and hopefully can lead you to waking up early and having a more productive day!
TRANSITIONING:: you’re probably thinking, well, that sounds great and I’d love to wake up earlier, say 8 or 9am, but I just can’t get there, no matter how hard I try, my body is just so used to sleeping in and staying up late. Well here are some tips for transitioning, and the key word here is transitioning. Not forcibly waking up at 8am after falling asleep at 3am and just coping with the five hours of sleep, because all this will do is actually deprive your body of sleep for that one night, then the following night you’ll sleep even more because your body is craving it, and yet again, you’ll be sleeping until noon.
A better, more sustainable option, is to wake up a little bit earlier everyday. It can even be just 15 minutes, and you can even make it fun and mark your progress in your bujo. It sounds frustrating and even a little uneventful, because it requires a few days to do it, but it’s much more rewarding because everyday all you have to do to reward yourself with gratitude for getting one step closer to being an earlybird is to wake up 15 minutes earlier. I think that’s pretty doable. And, it’s a process of your body adjusting, which means your body is more likely to adhere to waking up early if you follow this method. Needless to say, if you’re waking up 15 minutes earlier, you should also be going to sleep 15 minutes earlier. It’s a cycle, so keep with it! Mark your progress and applaud yourself for every 15 minutes!
SIGNALING:: our bodies do really well with signals because they tell your body what’s going on and doing something repeatedly can be a terrific tool for going to bed.
Drink tea:: chamomile is great because it actually makes you sleepy, plus tea warms up your body and makes you feel nice + cozy, making a nightly habit of it will soon become a signal to your body that chamomile=sleep.
Try not to look at screens:: I know, I know, to be honest I struggle with this one too. It’s difficult to reasonably expect ourselves to not check all of our social media before we go to bed (we are millennials after all). Most of what I’ve seen generally suggests prohibiting screens for two hours before bed, but I like to go by a general rule of thumb that if you’re lying in bed or your room is dark, you should not be looking at your phone, unless you’re setting your alarm of course!
Read a book:: there’s some type of difference in the way that our eyes work and the way that we perceive that makes it less evil to read a book or a kindle before bed than to look at your phone. I honestly haven’t looked into this, so I can’t say why, but I can say from experience that reading is a great way to really tire your eyes out, to relax, to quiet your mind, and to get ready for dreamland.
Make the last food you eat before a certain time, preferably around 6pm:: eating too late will cause your body to continue working on digesting your food while you’re trying to sleep, which can keep you up. Not to mention sugar and whatever else might be in what you’re eating can actually make you more alert. (also, avoid coffee and anything else that might be caffeinated in the evening, or if you’re like me and hyper-sensitive to caffeine, don’t drink any of it after 2pm)
ROUTINE:: you may have noticed that even though you’re staying up later and sleeping in, your schedule is still roughly around the same time everyday. Stay up until 3am, sleep until 2. Give or take, your body is pretty consistent. Making a set time to go to bed and to wake up every day can be part of signaling your body that it’s sleepytime.
ALARM CLOCK:: This is kind of a necessity, at least for me. If I were born in the middle ages, I’d probably be sleeping until noon and all of the villagers would hate me and throw rotten fruit at me just for kicks.
REM Cycle:: The (free) app Sleep Cycle (available for both iPhone and Android) is an app I’ve been using for probably a year now, and it’s great because it actually tracks your sleeping patterns (using the microphone) and gradually wakes you up when you’re in the lightest sleeping phase, making it much easier for you to wake up. It’s generally an awesome app, unlike other alarms which jar you into waking up. It’s also good to know that each REM cycle lasts about 90-120 minutes which means sleeping 7.5-8 hours is a good amount of time to not disrupt the cycle, so you can estimate and set your alarm for this amount of time after you’ll fall asleep (which might be ~30 minutes after getting in bed)
Step Out Of Bed:: A $2 iPhone app that literally forces you to get out of bed, the alarm clock won’t turn off until you get up and take thirty steps. There’s no getting out of this one!
Alternatively:: Put your alarm clock far away from your bed so you have to get up to turn it off! Charge your phone across the room! This has a double purpose, as putting your phone out of reach not only makes you physically get up in the morning, but it also prevents you from looking at your screen when in bed. Just be sure that your alarm will be loud enough to wake you from this distance! (But perhaps not loud enough to wake up other sleepers in your home)
Whatever you do, don’t snooze!:: when you snooze your alarm, you’ve already woken up and pulled out of REM which means that the extra ten minutes of sleep you’ll be getting won’t actually give you any more rest, and instead it’ll actually make you even more tired. It’s hard, and I’m definitely guilty of taking advantage of my snooze button, but this is something I’m working on. Try to keep the idea in your mind that you have to wake up when your alarm first goes off.
LET THE LIGHT IN:: I started doing this last year when I was studying abroad in Italy, so naturally I wanted to make the most of my time, and the way I did that was by not only using my alarm but more importantly, leaving my blinds wide open. My room received a lot of light, and it sometimes woke me up before my alarm, and I’ve been doing this again lately and it can be helpful, but it’s most useful for me when I set my alarm in accordance with my REM cycle.
WHAT TO THINK ABOUT?:: A lot of the time I find myself lying awake in bed simply because my brain won’t shut up and keeps rattling around with thoughts and ideas and I can’t get it quiet. Try to notice this when it happens, so you can understand where your anxieties are and how to prevent them from bothering you. Some possibilities for relaxing your mind:
Meditate:: The Headspace app is a great app for meditation, it only takes ten minutes but it can really calm you down.
Sounds:: Listen to calming music, it can anything: classical music, whale noises, rain, forest sounds, the ocean, white noise, whatever floats your boat.
Visualization:: This works the best for me and I actually tried it last night and I fell asleep in only 30 minutes! For me, film photography is ridiculously technical and I’ve done it for years, so I visually walked myself through processing film, literally step-by-step. I focused on every single movement, the sounds, the smells, the sensations in my hands, the weight of what I was holding, how long it’d take me to find something or wash something, and I actually noticed myself becoming more relaxed, and eventually, I fell asleep. Try to find some physical activity you do a lot and walk yourself through all the motions, brushing your dog, lacing up your shoes and going for a run, cleaning your room, making dinner, anything! You can also try counting sheep, running through the events of your morning with as much detail as possible, or think of fruits and vegetables that start with a certain letter, or anything else that might work for you! Your mind will wander, but that’s okay because that’s why you’re doing this visualization to begin with, so whenever your mind wanders, gently pull it back to what you’re visualizing.
THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY:: Ask someone to wake you up, a parent, sibling or roommate who usually wakes earlier than you (in addition to your alarm). Whether they’re already an earlybird or they wake up for a job or school, etc., it can be a good push to get out of bed. Your brain actually has to work to comprehend what they’re saying and then to work even more to form a coherent reply (so long as they don’t mind!)
EXERCISE:: Ah, the dreaded word. I know you already know why this will help you sleep better, but I’m going to say it anyway. Exercise tires you out, therefore you get sleepy sooner, and you sleep better. An even better bonus:: “Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don’t shoot their husbands. They just don’t.”
I hope you’ll find this useful, I’m still working on some of these myself, but this is all info I’ve compiled in my own research and so I thought I’d share! Send me a message with what worked for you and what didn’t, I’d love to know!
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