In the past I’ve only gotten up very early on the rare occasions that I’ve needed to be up earlier than around seven or eight, but after the “please let me die and/or go back to sleep” stage that lasts the first five or ten minutes until sleep momentum wears off, I’ve enjoyed being up that early, finding it almost thrilling to be awake while the day’s just getting bright and barely anyone’s around. After one pointless all-nighter where I got to watch the sun rise, I decided that that was enough reason to push me over the edge and start getting up early every morning.
I’ve been up early enough for the sunrise on the majority of mornings since then, with a few lapses including yesterday when I got up at 10 and noticed how late that felt now, when before it would have been a normal time for a morning without lectures. Although I can’t even see the sun because of the weather, and being up that early meant only sleeping four and a half hours, I’m very excited both for today and the future, modulo some disappointment that the caffeine/modafinil effect I mention in the above-linked comment is kicking in: I started typing this at 6:30, it’s 8:20 now and I still haven’t had breakfast. But that’s not indicative of how my mornings usually are in the new regime.
My main tool for getting up early is the app “alarm clock Xtreme”—I never sleep through alarms, but instead spend the first minute or so after being woken up earlier than I’d wake up if left to my own devices as a zombie-like-being that can think only of returning to sleep, so the “solve math problems to dismiss” feature is very useful; if I have to walk across the room and then solve ten moderately difficult mental math problems, I’m much less likely to go straight back to sleep, although for this morning I had to take a modafinil and set a 25-minute nap timer. To get up early sustainably requires going to bed early as well, but if you do one then the other tends to fall into place, and making myself get up early is a much easier problem than making myself go to bed early.
In the past I’ve only gotten up very early on the rare occasions that I’ve needed to be up earlier than around seven or eight, but after the “please let me die and/or go back to sleep” stage that lasts the first five or ten minutes until sleep momentum wears off, I’ve enjoyed being up that early, finding it almost thrilling to be awake while the day’s just getting bright and barely anyone’s around. After one pointless all-nighter where I got to watch the sun rise, I decided that that was enough reason to push me over the edge and start getting up early every morning.
I’ve been up early enough for the sunrise on the majority of mornings since then, with a few lapses including yesterday when I got up at 10 and noticed how late that felt now, when before it would have been a normal time for a morning without lectures. Although I can’t even see the sun because of the weather, and being up that early meant only sleeping four and a half hours, I’m very excited both for today and the future, modulo some disappointment that the caffeine/modafinil effect I mention in the above-linked comment is kicking in: I started typing this at 6:30, it’s 8:20 now and I still haven’t had breakfast. But that’s not indicative of how my mornings usually are in the new regime.
My main tool for getting up early is the app “alarm clock Xtreme”—I never sleep through alarms, but instead spend the first minute or so after being woken up earlier than I’d wake up if left to my own devices as a zombie-like-being that can think only of returning to sleep, so the “solve math problems to dismiss” feature is very useful; if I have to walk across the room and then solve ten moderately difficult mental math problems, I’m much less likely to go straight back to sleep, although for this morning I had to take a modafinil and set a 25-minute nap timer. To get up early sustainably requires going to bed early as well, but if you do one then the other tends to fall into place, and making myself get up early is a much easier problem than making myself go to bed early.
I have recently seemed to start needing less sleep, which may have made moving my sleep cycle around a lot easier than it would otherwise be.