How to Wake Up On Time, Every Time

When you first become self-employed, you might find yourself feeling eager to sleep in a little longer. This is definitely one of the perks of working from home and not needing to commute certainly means you can justify an hour longer in bed in most cases.

But this freedom can quickly become a drag. The problem? That snooze button! If you hit it once, you'll find that you often end up hitting it again and again. The result is that you wake up at 11am, 12pm, 1pm… And that then means you'll be working until 1am the next day. Not fun!

Here's the solution…

Go to Bed Earlier

The number one way by far to start waking up at a more reasonable time, is to go to bed at a more reasonable time the night before. As a general rule, you should only need around 8 hours and will probably function just fine on 7 hours. If you go to sleep at 1am, you can get up at 8am or 9am and be fine. Go to bed later though and your body will be fighting you every step of the way.

This might not be fun but it is the most simple and most effective way to make getting up easier.

Use Some CBT

CBT is cognitive behavioral therapy – a fantastic psychotherapeutic tool for changing the way you think to illicit numerous psychological and health benefits. Using cognitive restructuring, you accomplish this by looking at the contents of your thoughts and then replacing them with more positive and useful thoughts.

In this case, that more useful thought is to focus on one key aspect waking up. That is: if you sleep in longer, you feel worse. Try to focus on the way you felt last time you overslept: rushed, stressed, grubby and with a sore back most likely. Focus on that instead of how comfy you are and it will be easier to get up.

Small Steps

Another trick is to use smaller steps to wake up. Instead of telling yourself to spring out of bed and start doing press ups as soon as the alarm goes off, instead reach out and grab your phone to check your favorite website/forum for updates. When you do this, you'll find that the act of reading for five minutes even brings you around to make it easier to get up.