Waking up everyday at 4.30 am. How to develop the discipline and how to keep it.

Before you read any further, please note that the content below might not provide the best solutions if you are looking to become an early bird. What works for me might not work for you and I would rather get this out of the way right from the beginning. Over the years, I read so many articles on how to wake up early that I realised that a generalist approach to achieving this is a hit or miss exercise with more misses than hits. Sleep is a very personal activity and it is up to you to determine the methods that best correspond to your aim of changing your sleep pattern.

Now let's be very clear: if you still want to go ahead and give the proposed methods below a try, your goal should be to wake up at 4.30 am every day. This is the objective. Not 4.47 am, 4.51 am, 5.02 am or any other time that would still qualify as early morning. Processes and endeavours, especially hard ones, need precise targets. Your very precise target is to wake up at 4.30 am. I cannot stress this enough. As you set yourself on a journey to change your sleep schedule, you will see that a few minutes in the morning make a massive difference.

Take a look at the following tactics and decide for yourself if their application can help you get to a point where you do not need an alarm clock to wake up at 4.30 am most days of the week.

1. Be brutally honest with yourself on the average amount of sleep that you need per night.

The key word here is "average". It is inevitable that you will need more or less sleep depending on certain days and the associated activities. You cannot make any change if you do not know where you are standing in terms of average sleep. This average sleep is meant to be the number of hours that you need to recharge in order to be properly functional during your day without napping and without heavily resorting to coffee or other stimulants. The first three days of the week should normally enable you to arrive to a decent estimate of this average. This is because afterwork social events tend to take place as from Thursday and cause more fatigue especially with alcohol involved. Use the final four days of the week to measure the amount of additional sleep that you potentially require. If you have never tried to wake up very early before, spend at least three weeks to arrive to definite conclusions on your daily routines and on how much sleep you typically require for recovery. Once your average sleep has been determined, you can start making changes in your schedule.

2. The real challenge is not waking up, but going to sleep.

It's amazing how many people obsess about waking up early but have no clue on how to organise their night routine. I'm talking about developing a reliable and consistent ritual that takes you from Stage Awake to Stage Sleep within an acceptable amount of time. This is a lot harder than you think. For one, you must be willing to accept that there are things that can wait and do not need your immediate attention. Sounds simple? Ok then, how about this for a challenge: put your phone away and do not touch it 90 minutes before you go to sleep. Do it EVERY SINGLE NIGHT knowing that you will pick it up at 4.30 am in the morning and that it CAN wait in the meantime. If you cannot do this, and if you do not have a compelling reason linked to your profession or recurring emergencies, then you are more than likely wasting your time on your phone. No, let me correct that. You are wasting your LIFE on your phone. You will not get that time back and you could have used it to maintain a good sleep schedule. Your night ritual will determine your ability to wake up at a specific time. If you cannot organise the critical steps that are unique to you and stick to them, your sleep will always be subpar and waking up very early will look like an insurmountable challenge. That snooze button on your alarm clock will keep getting hit like a tennis ball. Work on your night ritual and make sure that you can apply it with minimal stress. You will become a lot more confident in mastering your sleep.

3. Accept that there will be relapses and work around them.

Here's some bad news: if you are used to wake up at a certain time, it is unlikely that you will be able to make radical changes in your sleep schedule overnight. For example, if you have woken up between 7 am and 8 am for the greater part of your life so far, you are not going to wake up everyday at 4.30 am starting tomorrow. This would be like asking someone who has not been to the gym for more than one year to suddenly get into an intense five-day training programme every week. More likely than not, that person's body will start to revolt and force the individual to fall back into his or her old ways. The same logic is applicable to sleep. Changes of this magnitude must be done incrementally. A good start would be to wake up at 4.30 am once a week for at least six weeks before taking it to two days, then more etc. If you can make it work once, you will grasp the steps needed to make it happen on a consistent basis. After that, it will be about increasing the frequency. How long you take to make it happen at least five days per week is entirely up to you. It might take months even years, but who cares? From the moment you can hit 4.30 am at least once a week without failing you are already ahead of the pack. Over a year, the benefits add up significantly.

And that's it. Three basic steps that can help you wake up at 4.30 am. No need for more since making all three work week after week will be a worthy test for your discipline. I could add stuff like don't drink coffee after X time and cut down on alcohol, but you've heard that a thousand times before. Use what works for you and keep that target in mind: 4.30 am.

Good luck,

Ashley Boolell | www.ashleyboolell.com

Please check my latest novel called Market Dystopia.