I am looking to set a morning routine for myself and wanted to hear if you have some unusual component in your morning routine other people might benefit from.
One thing I might start experimenting with is a version of morning contemplation. Ancient stoicism seems to suggest to reflect on one’s principles in the morning, christian tradition has morning prayers and Benjamin Franklin reviewed his virtues every morning, so why not do a little personalised version of it? Things like the serenity prayer or Tarski’s litany.
I have a terrible problem where I wake up from my alarm, turn off the alarm, then go back to sleep (I’ve missed several morning lectures this way). The solution I’ve been trialing is to put a glass of water and some caffeine pills on my bedside table when I go to sleep. That way, when I wake up I can turn off the alarm, take the pill and give in to the urge to put my head back on the pillow, confident that the caffeine will wake me up again a few minutes later. This has worked every time I’ve remembered to put out the pills.
I got this idea from someone else on LW but I’ve forgotten who, so credit to whomever it was.
Hmm, here’s another solution which a friend of mine tried which seems to require careful timing- set multiple alarms and have each alarm set to go off a few seconds after the other, having them lead you all the way around the room.
In general, I dislike posting comments that just express agreement without any content, but this is such an great idea that I just had to pop in and say, “That’s awesome.” So, without further ado:
It also happened to me. I used to wake up at 7:15, snoozing up until 7:30, which was very bad for my morning routine. Putting the alarm clock on the other side of the room helped, but when I tried to set the waking time at 7:00, I would just get up, snooze and go back to bed. Now I’m trying to set it to 7:10 and it seems to work well.
There probably is a subconscious set point which needs to be adjusted gradually. You also need stuff to do when you wake up: if you wake up just for the sake of it, your subconscious will know and put you back to sleep.
I would too, so I replaced my alarm with a cron job on my computer to play music at a certain time—usually an Insane Clown Posse song (specifically Vultures, which starts loudly and distinctively enough to work well structurally as an alarm), to make sure I wouldn’t stay in bed and listen.
As soon as I close my eyes to sleep I silently say to myself “I will wake up early in the morning” 100 times. If I do this I will wake up before my alarm without fail, if not I will hit snooze as many times as I can get away with it.
Have you ever learned (self-)hypnosis? I tried something quite close to this technique (repeat a phrase or short set of phrases as many times as I could, while intentionally relaxing as though into hypnosis but without the “and at the end of it I wake up again” key) after I learned self-hypnosis, and it achieved things I would not have thought were possible. Getting up without lazing in bed is interesting and handy, but programming my brain to wake up at 4AM (when you went to bed at 11PM or so) without an alarm of any kind was just freaky. I could hit within five minutes or so of my target time (it may help that I tended to fall asleep such that the last thing I saw before falling asleep was the time on my alarm clock) and I would wake up alert, enough so that it felt natural to get out of bed.
Of course, being roughly 13 at the time, I didn’t use this power for anything particularly valuable—usually just to sneak downstairs and play more StarCraft than I was allowed to play mid-week, then sneak back upstairs and into bed before my alarm went off for school—but the fact that I could do it still astonishes me. It’s a lot less reliable now, either because I’ve long since fallen out of practice with self-hypnosis or because my sleep schedule is now a lot more irregular but arguably less flexible to start with.
I should start practicing again… maybe even see if I can find my hypnosis lesson tapes (and something that will play audiocassette) for a reminder.
“I will wake up, alert and feeling rested, at 7:45 in the morning and immediately get out of bed. I will wake up, alert and feeling rested, at 7:45 in the morning and immediately get out of bed. I will wake...”
I have this ability when my sleep is regular enough and I’m somewhat aware of the time when I fall asleep. I think you probably could have done it without hypnosis, and the relaxation was the key, so that you fell asleep reliably and quickly.
I’ve got the self-timing ability (or at least did, I haven’t tested it lately) including being able to decide when I want to be out of a store—I can (or could) wander around, looking at whatever I pleased, and be out of the store within a minute or two of when I planned.
My ability kicked in when I’d been watching a lot of tv (not on a computer), so I had a chance to learn what a half hour was.
I consider the ability to monitor clock time unconsciously to be very mysterious.
Huh, I never tried using it for anything except sleep (or rather, waking). For me it’s quite literally an unconscious thing—the effect didn’t work if something prevented me from going to sleep while/after I did it (the idea being to repeat the sentences until I’m asleep) - but I don’t see any reason it shouldn’t be usable while awake. Now I’m curious and want to try it; thanks for the idea!
Note that my waking use of it is still unconscious. I don’t know that I could say what time it is, and I don’t have awareness that it’s getting close to the time I want to leave the store. I just happen to be done looking at things at the time when I wanted to be out of the store.
I set two alarms, about 1-2 minutes apart. The first one is soft and beside my bed, the second is loud and on the other side of the room. I get a couple minutes to achieve consciousness in a civilized fashion, and then the second alarm actually gets me out of bed. I’ve previously tried just having the second, but I got very good very fast at turning it off without really gaining consciousness.
The hack is due to Anders Sandberg, with modafinil tablets though [ETA: this last part is false, see Kaj’s reply]. Works wonderfully (whether with modafinil or caffeine).
I’ve cultivated a habit of following to the letter any deliberate precommitments I make to myself, because it seemed like a useful sort of habit, and I haven’t failed yet. I might even choose to make that part of my identity in time...
With that already in place for a few months, over the last few weeks I’ve noticed that I have woken (and stayed) up in time iff I went to sleep in time (about half the time) or used the precommitment of, freely translated, “When I next wake up, if I notice that my ringing mobile phone has the piece of duct tape stuck to it that I put there to trigger the memory of this precommitment, and remember this precommitment, I will not touch my mattress after turning it off for the following 10 minutes.” (about half of the remaining times)
You see, my morning self doesn’t actually want to sleep in, it just apparently hasn’t internalized induction on enough of a gut level to draw the connection between going back to bed and falling back asleep. What it does understand, is the connection between touching that mattress and tarnishing that record.
Edit: It now occurs to me that it might be a nonobvious warning that you carefully start with lesser precommitments, lest you ruin this forever for yourself by having an akrasia’d self not care enough about the habit. Your reach exceeds your grasp by default on this one.
Edit: Shit, I actually just went back to bed after those 10 minutes. Gonna have to modify that...
I am not a morning person and never have been. What I will do is if I really have to get up I will set three alarms: 1 on my iPad that is next to me in bed. Then I will place my iPhone across the room and set two alarms on it. Not only do I get residual alarms but I also get the getting out of bed effect. My Dad has a similar system and it has served him well since his military days.
I exercise for 5 minutes within 5 minutes of getting up.
Before I did this, I sometimes had the habit of checking e-mail for like an hour before getting out of bed. After adding this to my routine, I never did that again.
Yes, when I was in high school, I would do about 20 push ups as soon as I got out of bed. After that, my heartrate is a bit too high to go back to bed. Of course, after a while the 20 push ups would get easy so I would increase the number until I was doing about 50-70.
I think the best thing is to start implementing it as soon as you get up, to not give yourself time/opportunity to sabotage it. Also, get up as soon as you wake up.
I forget who suggested it, but I actually needed 2 alarm clocks to get my sleep schedule under control.
One wakes me up. It is across the room, on my computer chair. When I goes off I move it up to the shelf. Something about doing a task makes me loathe to go back to bed.
One makes me go to sleep. When it goes off, I stand up and put it on the computer chair. That way I can’t keep browsing the net, because I’m stuck standing up.
This was only necessary for like a week. Once I was going to bed at the same time every day I didn’t need alarms to wake up then. Nowadays I wake up almost automatically.
The key for me was going to bed at a set hour every day.
I have gotten myself a manual coffee grinder. Using this device it takes me about 4 minutes to grind enough beans for a large Melitta pot. Attending to this repetitive task gives me a small but regular block of time during which I find it easy to practice mindfullness. And when I am done, I make a pot of coffee.
I get my shower the night to keep my bed clean and reduce morning prep time, allowing me to wake up later. Then just wet my hair with water in the morning for combing. I also have an Ensure as soon as I wake up, even if I’m going to have a more substantial breakfast shortly thereafter, because otherwise I’m a zombie.
One part is writing down whatever dreams I can remember right upon awaking. This has led to me occasionally experiencing lucid dreams without really trying.
Also since I am writing dreams anyway, this makes it easy to do the other writing which I find beneficial. Namely, writing the major plan of the day and gratitude stuff.
[Meta] I often see threads like this where people recommend things that require a very high level of conscientiousness or planning ability to start with, (e.g. if you are tired in the mornings get out of bed immediately and do x, requirs you to be capable of forcing yourself to do x when you are tired.)
I think you are mistaken about what is easy and difficult. Most of these are about dealing with lack of willpower, suggesting that the authors found something that was easier than it looked. Most of them don’t compare before and after, but jsteinhardt’s does.
I am looking to set a morning routine for myself and wanted to hear if you have some unusual component in your morning routine other people might benefit from.
One thing I might start experimenting with is a version of morning contemplation. Ancient stoicism seems to suggest to reflect on one’s principles in the morning, christian tradition has morning prayers and Benjamin Franklin reviewed his virtues every morning, so why not do a little personalised version of it? Things like the serenity prayer or Tarski’s litany.
I have a terrible problem where I wake up from my alarm, turn off the alarm, then go back to sleep (I’ve missed several morning lectures this way). The solution I’ve been trialing is to put a glass of water and some caffeine pills on my bedside table when I go to sleep. That way, when I wake up I can turn off the alarm, take the pill and give in to the urge to put my head back on the pillow, confident that the caffeine will wake me up again a few minutes later. This has worked every time I’ve remembered to put out the pills.
I got this idea from someone else on LW but I’ve forgotten who, so credit to whomever it was.
My preferred solution for this problem is to have the alarm on the other side of the room so I have to actively get out of bed and walk over to it.
I tried that before, I’d just turn it off and get back into bed.
Hmm, here’s another solution which a friend of mine tried which seems to require careful timing- set multiple alarms and have each alarm set to go off a few seconds after the other, having them lead you all the way around the room.
In general, I dislike posting comments that just express agreement without any content, but this is such an great idea that I just had to pop in and say, “That’s awesome.” So, without further ado:
That’s awesome.
It also happened to me. I used to wake up at 7:15, snoozing up until 7:30, which was very bad for my morning routine. Putting the alarm clock on the other side of the room helped, but when I tried to set the waking time at 7:00, I would just get up, snooze and go back to bed. Now I’m trying to set it to 7:10 and it seems to work well.
There probably is a subconscious set point which needs to be adjusted gradually. You also need stuff to do when you wake up: if you wake up just for the sake of it, your subconscious will know and put you back to sleep.
I would too, so I replaced my alarm with a cron job on my computer to play music at a certain time—usually an Insane Clown Posse song (specifically Vultures, which starts loudly and distinctively enough to work well structurally as an alarm), to make sure I wouldn’t stay in bed and listen.
Hard mode version: instead of music, use a cron job that will start deleting all your files if you don’t answer a prompt within the space of a minute.
Then one day you’re ill, or in the shower, or you go away on business and forget to disable the cron job, and BOOM no more files.
As soon as I close my eyes to sleep I silently say to myself “I will wake up early in the morning” 100 times. If I do this I will wake up before my alarm without fail, if not I will hit snooze as many times as I can get away with it.
Have you ever learned (self-)hypnosis? I tried something quite close to this technique (repeat a phrase or short set of phrases as many times as I could, while intentionally relaxing as though into hypnosis but without the “and at the end of it I wake up again” key) after I learned self-hypnosis, and it achieved things I would not have thought were possible. Getting up without lazing in bed is interesting and handy, but programming my brain to wake up at 4AM (when you went to bed at 11PM or so) without an alarm of any kind was just freaky. I could hit within five minutes or so of my target time (it may help that I tended to fall asleep such that the last thing I saw before falling asleep was the time on my alarm clock) and I would wake up alert, enough so that it felt natural to get out of bed.
Of course, being roughly 13 at the time, I didn’t use this power for anything particularly valuable—usually just to sneak downstairs and play more StarCraft than I was allowed to play mid-week, then sneak back upstairs and into bed before my alarm went off for school—but the fact that I could do it still astonishes me. It’s a lot less reliable now, either because I’ve long since fallen out of practice with self-hypnosis or because my sleep schedule is now a lot more irregular but arguably less flexible to start with.
I should start practicing again… maybe even see if I can find my hypnosis lesson tapes (and something that will play audiocassette) for a reminder.
“I will wake up, alert and feeling rested, at 7:45 in the morning and immediately get out of bed. I will wake up, alert and feeling rested, at 7:45 in the morning and immediately get out of bed. I will wake...”
I have this ability when my sleep is regular enough and I’m somewhat aware of the time when I fall asleep. I think you probably could have done it without hypnosis, and the relaxation was the key, so that you fell asleep reliably and quickly.
I’ve got the self-timing ability (or at least did, I haven’t tested it lately) including being able to decide when I want to be out of a store—I can (or could) wander around, looking at whatever I pleased, and be out of the store within a minute or two of when I planned.
My ability kicked in when I’d been watching a lot of tv (not on a computer), so I had a chance to learn what a half hour was.
I consider the ability to monitor clock time unconsciously to be very mysterious.
Huh, I never tried using it for anything except sleep (or rather, waking). For me it’s quite literally an unconscious thing—the effect didn’t work if something prevented me from going to sleep while/after I did it (the idea being to repeat the sentences until I’m asleep) - but I don’t see any reason it shouldn’t be usable while awake. Now I’m curious and want to try it; thanks for the idea!
Note that my waking use of it is still unconscious. I don’t know that I could say what time it is, and I don’t have awareness that it’s getting close to the time I want to leave the store. I just happen to be done looking at things at the time when I wanted to be out of the store.
I set two alarms, about 1-2 minutes apart. The first one is soft and beside my bed, the second is loud and on the other side of the room. I get a couple minutes to achieve consciousness in a civilized fashion, and then the second alarm actually gets me out of bed. I’ve previously tried just having the second, but I got very good very fast at turning it off without really gaining consciousness.
The hack is due to Anders Sandberg, with modafinil tablets though [ETA: this last part is false, see Kaj’s reply]. Works wonderfully (whether with modafinil or caffeine).
Historical note: his original blog post on it specifically used caffeine pills.
Huh, thanks. Not sure how I managed to misremember so specifically. Edited post.
I’ve cultivated a habit of following to the letter any deliberate precommitments I make to myself, because it seemed like a useful sort of habit, and I haven’t failed yet. I might even choose to make that part of my identity in time...
With that already in place for a few months, over the last few weeks I’ve noticed that I have woken (and stayed) up in time iff I went to sleep in time (about half the time) or used the precommitment of, freely translated, “When I next wake up, if I notice that my ringing mobile phone has the piece of duct tape stuck to it that I put there to trigger the memory of this precommitment, and remember this precommitment, I will not touch my mattress after turning it off for the following 10 minutes.” (about half of the remaining times)
You see, my morning self doesn’t actually want to sleep in, it just apparently hasn’t internalized induction on enough of a gut level to draw the connection between going back to bed and falling back asleep. What it does understand, is the connection between touching that mattress and tarnishing that record.
Edit: It now occurs to me that it might be a nonobvious warning that you carefully start with lesser precommitments, lest you ruin this forever for yourself by having an akrasia’d self not care enough about the habit. Your reach exceeds your grasp by default on this one.
Edit: Shit, I actually just went back to bed after those 10 minutes. Gonna have to modify that...
I am not a morning person and never have been. What I will do is if I really have to get up I will set three alarms: 1 on my iPad that is next to me in bed. Then I will place my iPhone across the room and set two alarms on it. Not only do I get residual alarms but I also get the getting out of bed effect. My Dad has a similar system and it has served him well since his military days.
I exercise for 5 minutes within 5 minutes of getting up.
Before I did this, I sometimes had the habit of checking e-mail for like an hour before getting out of bed. After adding this to my routine, I never did that again.
Yes, when I was in high school, I would do about 20 push ups as soon as I got out of bed. After that, my heartrate is a bit too high to go back to bed. Of course, after a while the 20 push ups would get easy so I would increase the number until I was doing about 50-70.
I think the best thing is to start implementing it as soon as you get up, to not give yourself time/opportunity to sabotage it. Also, get up as soon as you wake up.
This may be the biggest causative factor of how my day goes (though it is itself subject to causes such as when I went to bed).
Don’t neglect this.
I forget who suggested it, but I actually needed 2 alarm clocks to get my sleep schedule under control.
One wakes me up. It is across the room, on my computer chair. When I goes off I move it up to the shelf. Something about doing a task makes me loathe to go back to bed.
One makes me go to sleep. When it goes off, I stand up and put it on the computer chair. That way I can’t keep browsing the net, because I’m stuck standing up.
This was only necessary for like a week. Once I was going to bed at the same time every day I didn’t need alarms to wake up then. Nowadays I wake up almost automatically.
The key for me was going to bed at a set hour every day.
I have gotten myself a manual coffee grinder. Using this device it takes me about 4 minutes to grind enough beans for a large Melitta pot. Attending to this repetitive task gives me a small but regular block of time during which I find it easy to practice mindfullness. And when I am done, I make a pot of coffee.
I get my shower the night to keep my bed clean and reduce morning prep time, allowing me to wake up later. Then just wet my hair with water in the morning for combing. I also have an Ensure as soon as I wake up, even if I’m going to have a more substantial breakfast shortly thereafter, because otherwise I’m a zombie.
I don’t know how unusual these are, but some of the components of my routine are:
putting the alarm on the other side of the room, so I get sure I don’t snooze;
workout with a 10 min torcher;
cold shower after workout;
a brief five minutes meditation before leaving.
Shower first. Then make breakfast/coffee.
One part is writing down whatever dreams I can remember right upon awaking. This has led to me occasionally experiencing lucid dreams without really trying.
Also since I am writing dreams anyway, this makes it easy to do the other writing which I find beneficial. Namely, writing the major plan of the day and gratitude stuff.
You might be interested in this, if you haven’t already seen it.
[Meta] I often see threads like this where people recommend things that require a very high level of conscientiousness or planning ability to start with, (e.g. if you are tired in the mornings get out of bed immediately and do x, requirs you to be capable of forcing yourself to do x when you are tired.)
I think you are mistaken about what is easy and difficult. Most of these are about dealing with lack of willpower, suggesting that the authors found something that was easier than it looked. Most of them don’t compare before and after, but jsteinhardt’s does.