Speaking as someone who (literally as I type) is vainly struggling to get out of bed, I appreciate this post—but do you happen to have any meta-willpower tricks? The techinque you described won’t quite work for me, because I’ve realized I don’t actually want to get out of bed; at best I want to want.
I don’t actually want to get out of bed; at best I want to want.
Try imagining that you want to get out of bed. ;-)
Really, there’s no such thing as meta-willpower. Our brains don’t really have meta-responses, they have sequential responses, where the “meta” thought is simply “about” the preceding thought.
However, we’re as easily fooled and distracted by these “meta” thoughts as by any other thought, and following/believing in them drops you out of monoidealism just as easily. In Coue’s words, when the imagination and will are in conflict, the imagination always wins. You need to only imagine getting out of bed, to the exclusion of any thoughts about whether you want to. And you need to either imagine it already happening, or about it happening after a countdown… as long as you imagine and expect that it will actually happen.
Personally, I’ve had all of my difficulties with getting up early solved by the quick caffeine trick. In short: have an alarm clock sound an hour or so before you should actually get up, when you reset it spend 10 seconds grabbing a caffeine pill and swallowing it, set the clock to repeat the alarm in an 30-60 minutes, and go back to sleep. By the time your clock will sound again, it’s likely that the caffeine will have made you want to get up.
Speaking as someone who (literally as I type) is vainly struggling to get out of bed, I appreciate this post—but do you happen to have any meta-willpower tricks? The techinque you described won’t quite work for me, because I’ve realized I don’t actually want to get out of bed; at best I want to want.
Try imagining that you want to get out of bed. ;-)
Really, there’s no such thing as meta-willpower. Our brains don’t really have meta-responses, they have sequential responses, where the “meta” thought is simply “about” the preceding thought.
However, we’re as easily fooled and distracted by these “meta” thoughts as by any other thought, and following/believing in them drops you out of monoidealism just as easily. In Coue’s words, when the imagination and will are in conflict, the imagination always wins. You need to only imagine getting out of bed, to the exclusion of any thoughts about whether you want to. And you need to either imagine it already happening, or about it happening after a countdown… as long as you imagine and expect that it will actually happen.
Personally, I’ve had all of my difficulties with getting up early solved by the quick caffeine trick. In short: have an alarm clock sound an hour or so before you should actually get up, when you reset it spend 10 seconds grabbing a caffeine pill and swallowing it, set the clock to repeat the alarm in an 30-60 minutes, and go back to sleep. By the time your clock will sound again, it’s likely that the caffeine will have made you want to get up.