When I was having a lot of trouble getting out of bed reasonably promptly in the mornings: practice getting out of bed—but not after just having woken up, that’s what I was having trouble with in the first place. No, during the day, having been up for a while, go lie in bed for a couple of minutes with the alarm set, then get up when it goes off. Also, make this a pleasant routine with stretching, smiling and deep breathing.
An alternative, courtesy of Anders Sandberg (via Kaj Sotala), is to set your alarm to ring two hours before your desired wake-up time, take one or two 50mg caffeine pills when it rings, and go back to sleep immediately thereafter. When you wake two hours later, getting out of bed shouldn’t be a problem. Details here.
Coffeine doesn’t work for ~10% of the population (like me).
ADDED:
I don’t know exactly what’s different and to what extent the effect exists but caffein doesn’t have significant waking or alerting effects on me. At least not a 200mg pill (corresp. 2 liter coke or 2-5 cups of coffee). These I take to treat migraine where the caffeine does have a very notable effect on me.
“Caffeine has a tremendously wide variation in action,” Regestein admits. “The people who say ‘I can drink a cup of coffee right before I go to bed and go right to sleep’ aren’t lying.” Hard biochemical research confirms the fact. Carney describes “one common strain of laboratory mouse, Jackson’s Lab’s SWR strain, inbred since the 1920s, who is just totally immune to the effect of caffeine: there’s no dose that will excite him—not 100 milligrams per kilogram, which would be equivalent to 100 cups of coffee in a human.
And the opposite:
Carney points out that if some individuals are not much affected by caffeine, others—some 5 to 10 percent of the population—are hypersensitive to its effects. These individuals are the most likely to succumb to a serious coffee habit, exhibit the greatest physical and personality effects from it, and have the greatest difficulty in finally kicking the habit.
I’m currently trying it out on a loose alternating-day basis; if it seems to be working, I may upgrade to blinding & randomization.
EDIT: it does correlate with earlier wake up, so I’ve upgraded to randomization; the blinding didn’t work out because the caffeine pills have too detectible a flavor.
I set my alarm 5 minutes before I actually want to wake up. When it rings the first time, I consume a large glass of fake lemonade (the kind with lots and lots of sugar). Perhaps not healthy, but it works—among other things, the presence of sugar in the mouth immediately releases dopamine. On the few occasions the energy isn’t enough, the urge to use the bathroom is ;)
I tried the coffee thing, for me, sugar works more reliably.
FYI, this training is part of USAF basic training. With more yelling. I wouldn’t call it a pleasant routine, but it’s certainly effective when you do it for six hours straight and start to get an adrenaline surge when your alarm goes off.
That still persists 1.5 years later, so it may be a munchkin hack in itself.
I’d be interested in hearing more about your training experience; I’m sure the USAF and the like have discovered more than a few interesting behavioral hacks!
I agree absolutely—however the effect wanes. I found the behavior would go extinct maybe a week or so after a 20 minute session of doing this. Reading this has inspired me to do the straightforward thing and just practice weekly.
I have found that I wake much more effectively when the alarm is very quiet; rather than waking suddenly and having my brain rebel, I wake over the course of 30 second to 2 minutes. This works much better than it has any reason to.
The downside is that a very quiet alarm is easy to miss, and if there is environmental noise at the same time as the alarm goes off (from the air coming on to trash pickup), it’s much too easy to sleep through. The solution that worked best for me was to run a white noise generator (actually an air filter) all night; this raised the noise threshold so that a louder alarm was needed to still be a quiet-but-audible alarm; the louder alarm is loud enough to be heard over the white noise, and thus loud enough to be heard over any environmental noise that is not also loud enough to wake me.
Another useful trick, albeit slightly more painful, is to get up at the same time every morning. This means also on weekends. It really does help, but requires that you are willing to actually wake up enough to get out of bed. Once you are ‘up’, you may decide to just read Facebook for 5 minutes before going back to bed (I usually just went to the bathroom and then read in bed for 15 minutes before falling back to sleep). I only use this when I have a significant change in schedule, and only for a couple of weeks.
When I was having a lot of trouble getting out of bed reasonably promptly in the mornings: practice getting out of bed—but not after just having woken up, that’s what I was having trouble with in the first place. No, during the day, having been up for a while, go lie in bed for a couple of minutes with the alarm set, then get up when it goes off. Also, make this a pleasant routine with stretching, smiling and deep breathing.
I found this idea on the net here, which may have more details: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right-away-when-your-alarm-goes-off/
I tried it and it seemed to help a lot for a while, and I feel more in control of my weekend mornings.
An alternative, courtesy of Anders Sandberg (via Kaj Sotala), is to set your alarm to ring two hours before your desired wake-up time, take one or two 50mg caffeine pills when it rings, and go back to sleep immediately thereafter. When you wake two hours later, getting out of bed shouldn’t be a problem. Details here.
Coffeine doesn’t work for ~10% of the population (like me).
ADDED:
I don’t know exactly what’s different and to what extent the effect exists but caffein doesn’t have significant waking or alerting effects on me. At least not a 200mg pill (corresp. 2 liter coke or 2-5 cups of coffee). These I take to treat migraine where the caffeine does have a very notable effect on me.
And the opposite:
From Health: Does Coffee Make You Sleepy? Researchers now understand how caffeine works on the nervous system. For some, it may cause the opposite of its intended effect. By Roger Downey
See also http://flipper.diff.org/app/items/5455 for migraine and caffeine.
What do you mean with “doesn’t work”. Your A1 receptors are formed in a way where caffeine doesn’t connect to them?
Answered above
Does that work for you?
I tried it only a few times and didn’t notice any clear effects. So as far as I can tell, no, it doesn’t work for me.
Have you tested this intervention on yourself more systematically?
I’m currently trying it out on a loose alternating-day basis; if it seems to be working, I may upgrade to blinding & randomization.
EDIT: it does correlate with earlier wake up, so I’ve upgraded to randomization; the blinding didn’t work out because the caffeine pills have too detectible a flavor.
I set my alarm 5 minutes before I actually want to wake up. When it rings the first time, I consume a large glass of fake lemonade (the kind with lots and lots of sugar). Perhaps not healthy, but it works—among other things, the presence of sugar in the mouth immediately releases dopamine. On the few occasions the energy isn’t enough, the urge to use the bathroom is ;)
I tried the coffee thing, for me, sugar works more reliably.
FYI, this training is part of USAF basic training. With more yelling. I wouldn’t call it a pleasant routine, but it’s certainly effective when you do it for six hours straight and start to get an adrenaline surge when your alarm goes off.
That still persists 1.5 years later, so it may be a munchkin hack in itself.
I’d be interested in hearing more about your training experience; I’m sure the USAF and the like have discovered more than a few interesting behavioral hacks!
I agree absolutely—however the effect wanes. I found the behavior would go extinct maybe a week or so after a 20 minute session of doing this. Reading this has inspired me to do the straightforward thing and just practice weekly.
I have found that I wake much more effectively when the alarm is very quiet; rather than waking suddenly and having my brain rebel, I wake over the course of 30 second to 2 minutes. This works much better than it has any reason to.
The downside is that a very quiet alarm is easy to miss, and if there is environmental noise at the same time as the alarm goes off (from the air coming on to trash pickup), it’s much too easy to sleep through. The solution that worked best for me was to run a white noise generator (actually an air filter) all night; this raised the noise threshold so that a louder alarm was needed to still be a quiet-but-audible alarm; the louder alarm is loud enough to be heard over the white noise, and thus loud enough to be heard over any environmental noise that is not also loud enough to wake me.
Another useful trick, albeit slightly more painful, is to get up at the same time every morning. This means also on weekends. It really does help, but requires that you are willing to actually wake up enough to get out of bed. Once you are ‘up’, you may decide to just read Facebook for 5 minutes before going back to bed (I usually just went to the bathroom and then read in bed for 15 minutes before falling back to sleep). I only use this when I have a significant change in schedule, and only for a couple of weeks.