Ask HN: What did you do that got you to wake up earlier?

That was it! Couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was called.

I take my sleep very seriously and consider myself lucky to keep a good schedule, but there are things you can do to make it happen. Also, getting quality sleep is like being fit, meaning that if you follow some principles you will get the desired results. The hard part isn't knowing what to do. It's doing it.

The main factors are schedule and quality.

1. Schedule- figure out how many hours you need. For me, it's about 8. Maybe you need 9, 10, or 6. Decide what time you want to get up, and start trying to go to bed at the appropriate time. Don't deviate or give up. This is where discipline matters.

2. Quality- don't sabotage yourself. Don't consume caffeine late in the day. Caffeine has a half life and chemistry doesn't lie. Just because you think you can sleep with caffeine in your system doesn't mean it isn't harming quality. Try to wind down your mind with reading or stretching. I'm not entirely sold on the effect of blue light, but to each their own. Alcohol should be avoided too, if you're serious about good sleep.

Finally, the most impactful motivator for me is how much my life improved once I started treating my sleep with respect. As I've gotten older, I noticed that the quality of my daytime cognition is far better with good sleep patterns (go figure). In the long run this will pay dividends. My colleagues still believe they can function just like they did as college students. They don't.

Emotional balance: giving yourself some personal time instead of waking up and immediately going to work will improve your mental health. All of this provides a positive feedback loop which will motivate good sleep habits.

I'm in bed at 9, asleep by 930, and up by 530 without an alarm. I leave for work at 730, so there is literally no stress to wake up by a certain time.

I stopped using an alarm.

I grew up before smartphones, so the alarm was a clock radio. I would hit the snooze button for about two hours, almost every day. I'd set my alarm early because I wanted some time before having to be anywhere, but then I'd hit the snooze button repeatedly until I had to get up. This made a vicious cycle where I set the alarm early because I knew I'd hit snooze repeatedly.

I tried moving my alarm clock to the foot of my bed. It worked for a couple days, then I could hit snooze there without waking up. Then I moved it across the room, and learned to walk across the room and hit snooze without waking up. I got as far as physically removing the snooze button from the clock, taping over the hole, and putting the clock on a high shelf where I had to stand on a chair and a desk to reach it. In about a week I could climb that desk, reset the alarm for nine minutes later, and go back to bed without waking up.

That led me to just not setting an alarm. I figured I would probably wake up later than the time I was setting my alarm for, but earlier than when I needed to be up. It worked; I was not late for anything that first week or so. As I got used to having no alarm, it made me pay way more attention to my bedtime routine. I went to bed earlier, because I knew I needed sleep in order to wake up. Instead of being jolted out of deep sleep, I woke up naturally during lighter sleep cycles when it's easier to get up.

That was 30 years ago now. With smartphones I set an alarm in order to be up in time to get my kid ready for school, but it rarely goes off; I now have a habit of getting up when I wake up before the alarm. I set alarms when I'm trying to make a 6am flight, but I have also chosen to not set an alarm for important events like exams and conferences and such.

I haven't used an alarm for over 10 years at this point. I realized that I was almost always waking up about 5-10 minutes before the alarm went off. Some experimentation showed that by thinking of a time before I went to bed, I could wake myself up around that time, even it was 2 or 3am.

Now, I only set alarms for early times, and only as a back-up. Unless I'm very sleep deprived, they're not needed.

To answer OP, over the past year, I've been on a quest to wake up earlier, and the answer has been a dull one. I've very slowly started going to sleep earlier. I started with an average "asleep" time of 1-2am, and am now at about 11pm. That's shifted my normal wake time from 7:30am to 6:30am. Those good at math will note that's actually more sleep, which has been great, too.

Lamp on bedside table on a z-wave plug controlled by node-red. Light turns on 10 min before my alarm goes off.