Ask HN: How can I get up early in the morning?

For me it is, asleep from 1-4:40am, wake up at 7:30am to get the kids off to school, back asleep by 8:30am wake up at 11:00am-12:00pm. I then start work (I can work any hours I like as long as I do the work). Frankly, it kind of sucks. I've always wished I could get up early, chipper and fresh but even when I was a little kid I couldn't (well, when I was 8 I could).

Even by the age of 10, when I had to get up at 5:00am to deliver a paper route, I was an absolute wreck in the morning. By the time I was a High School student I would essentially spend the entire first half of the day in a sleepy haze even falling asleep in the midst of taking tests (I would jump with a start and find pencil trails running down the sheet where I had passed out). Teachers would yell at me for sleeping in their class all the time.

No I don't have narcolepsy... I was tested. Most they came back with was I have mild sleep apnea but the stupid breathing machine they give you just prevents me from sleeping even more so I quit wearing it... so I could actually get SOME sleep. ARGH!!!

Wake up very early the next day. Get something like 4-5 hours of sleep. Then you'll be so tired that you'll have to go to bed early. Then start a routine of going to bed and waking up at the same time every day and your body will get used to it.

To go to bed earlier

1) get up earlier

2) You can only shift your schedule about 1 hour per day. You can try shifting it more, but you're going to have sweater-head, nausea and hot flashes. If you go from getting up at 11 to getting up at 5, expect five days of feeling like crap.

3) The pineal gland is activated by light incident on the retina. So calculate when you need to go to sleep based on when you get up, and stop using the computer one hour prior. AND use Flux, or do something to turn down the absolute amount of light coming from your screen(s).

4) The sleep-wake cycle is naturally about 25 hours. It takes discipline to go to sleep at the same time every night. Or exhaustion.

5) Recent findings suggest that starvation can suspend the diurnal cycle 12 hours or more. So eat a good dinner.

6) Additionally, fats, proteins, warmth, and bulk activate the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest). Simple carbs offer none of these things. So fatty snacks are better. Unsalted nuts are a great snack (salt stimulated the cephalic phase of eating. So, sorry, but bacon is not a good snack).

7) Caffeine. Metabolized in the liver at a second-order decay rate by CYP1A2. Effective half-life is 3-7 hours.

Coffee: 30-170 mg/8oz Espresso: 30-50 mg/oz Tea: 10-50 mg/8oz (more with black teas) Soda: 30-60 mg/12oz Dark chocolate: 20mg/oz

Minimum effective concentration is around 0.05 mg/dL. Total body water is 40L for a 5'10" male (5'10" male has about a 70kg lean body mass regardless of total body weight and 40L of that is water. The 70kg and 40L vary linearly with height for adults). So those two cups of French pressed Sumatra you stopped drinking at 8:30 after a 7pm pasta dinner could easily keep you wired until 1 or 2 in the morning. Go on, have that chocolate ice cream, too.

8) Calculate when you want to get up (remember, you need to phase in the change, one hour a day). Establish a routine that starts at dinner. Eat. No more caffeine. Work. Have a small, fatty snack. Work until an hour before you need to go to sleep. Brush your teeth, change; lay down. Read something good. I recommend the classics. Doesn't really engage the problem-solving areas of your brain, but you've been meaning to start reading those things. Start with Plato. Very readable.

9) If you just absolutely have to go to sleep with noise, I recommend white noise. A beat, rhythm, or lyric will capture your conscious mind.

As for getting up, the only thing I've found that definitely will get me up without relying on sunrise is a social commitment. If surgery starts at 7 am and I need to round on patients before then, it's relatively easy to get up at 4:15. If I'm on a "research month", um, yeah.

Getting up in the morning used to be one of the central struggles of my life (seriously), but I rarely think about it now and I'm almost always up by 430am, which is something I never thought would happen. Here's my story, if anyone is interested.

I've struggled with getting up my entire life, and so has my entire family, immediate and extended. My 18-year-old brother regularly sleeps until 1pm, as do many of my cousins and their parents. I was homeschooled growing up and the day didn't typically start until 11am. In high school, I got suspended numerous times for missing my first few classes. I joined the Navy out of HS and I pretty rarely had issues with being late because I overslept, because the military is very effective at putting the fear of God in you regarding the consequences. I still always slept until the last possible minute before getting up. After the Navy, I went back to finish college and ended up taking about 30 hours worth of classes every semester, which helped some, but I still overslept and was always jumping out of bed and rushing to class at the last second. I very often would sit down in class about 5-10 mins after having been sound asleep before. My wife was very frustrated, and I was frustrated with myself. I was sure that I had some kind of sleep disorder, especially since my whole family is like this.

So what changed? Mostly what changed is that I realized what you've realized: life is too short to sleep it away. My central problem has always been the actual act of getting up; once I'm up and awake, I'm fine. So I started looking around and I found this article by Steve Pavlina:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-ea...

Basically, his method is to practice getting up, in the middle of the day. Bizarre (and embarrassing), but it works. I did this every day for a few weeks, and I immediately noticed a difference.

The other big thing I did was go to bed early. Not earlier, as I typically went to bed at 1am or 2am, but early. Like 8pm. I'd go to bed at 8pm for a week and get up at 5am. That was more sleep than I usually got, and since I was doing it consistently, it got easier over time. Then I started going to bed a little later and now I usually get to bed between 9pm and 10pm. Because I'm consistent, I get better quality sleep and I can get by on 7 hours consistently.

I know it's frustrating to have someone tell you to just go to bed early, but I found that it's a lot harder than it looks, especially because you've almost always got way more to do than you have time for and it feels like you should work on some of it rather than go to bed. The key for me was realizing (after some "split-testing") that I get probably 2-3x more accomplished in the four hours from 5am - 9am that I do from 10pm - 2am.

A few other things that I found vital: - no caffeine after noon - no computer or tv within an hour of bed - keep room as dark and quiet as possible while sleeping - try to keep the same schedule on weekends - alarm clock in different room - once you're up, immediately splash water in your face - exercise several times per week - track your progress!

Try this for a month. Most people I know who have become early risers would never go back. There's something incredibly rewarding about hitting 8am having already had breakfast, worked out, showered, knocked out a bunch of emails, read all your blogs, and built two new features. In San Francisco, that means you're about two hours from when most folks even start working :)

Good luck!

In the extreme, eating can kill you also :/