Live Out of the Box

I’ve started my 30 day trial on waking up early on the first week of January but since I couldn’t get past thru the Firewall of my country, I’ve decided to blog my journal entries here in the Philippines. So what you will see here a succession of posts as they were written in my notebook. The date on when it was written will be posted on top.

January 3: woke up at 10:00 AM

January 4: 8:00 AM

My first two attempts at the trial fizzled out because I overshot my goal and tried to wake up at 6AM. So I changed it to a more realistic time. It wasn’t actually till January 5 that I barely succeeded waking up at 7 AM.

Here’s the log…

January 5

Woke up to my IPOD blaring but I closed my eyes and just stayed in bed for 30 more minutes. I was awake though. It was very hard to kick back the covers and just get up!

See:

How to Wake Up Early Plan Part 1

How to Wake Up Early Plan Part 2

This is a continuation of How to Wake Up Early Plan Part 1. This part gives more technical details on how to overcome the most difficult hurdle of all –just getting up.

The Detox Period is Crucial

Do not plan anything major on the detox period. And for god’s sake don’t begin your 30 day trial in the middle of a stressful week. You’d only get more anxious. A long school break or vacation is ideal for you to start your 30 day trial as I’m doing now. That way other matters won’t preoccupy your mind.

One Step at a Time –Taking it easy

During the first phase, just try to wake up and that’s it. No need to get out of bed. Just don’t ever go back to sleep! Open your eyes and stay in bed if you have to. The important thing is to wake up at the desired time. Don’t push yourself. Don’t be guilty that you can do more. The ‘more’ part will come later. Don’t set too high of an expectation that you can’t fulfill.
Eventually you’ll find after Day 1, 2, 3 that just getting out of bed becomes easier.

One step at a time….

Focus 100% on the Goal

I can only work effectively on just one goal at a time. I’m a terrible multitasker because my thoughts get all scattered and I can’t focus. In this situation, my mind is like a machine on the verge of destruction and all tasks just get thrown about. But if I can see only one target, then all my powers are concentrated on it and I throw everything that I’ve got on it. It’s like you see a red target on a field and you throw your spear towards it with all the strength you can muster. Pure single mindedness dedication. It’s like Forrest Gump who would succeed in almost everything he did because he’ll focus all his mind on just that one thing and nothing else. If you’re like me, then you MUST set aside everything else and just direct all your energy into one goal. Never mind that you won’t do your other tasks. They won’t be done anyway. I used to do this before and I never wind up accomplishing anything because I often set them aside. I would focus on 3 goals and they’d just flop since I wasn’t paying enough attention to them.

For my 30 day trial on waking up early, I’ll focus on nothing else but this. Doing so would enable me to channel all my energy on one target and wham! – hit it 100%.

How To Wake Up Early

Preparation:

Post Just Do It! sign opposite bed

IPOD (with the option to play your playlist as the alarm goes off) or any MP3 player/CD player/stereo/radio or any other device in with a built in alarm feature in which music will play when it goes on

speakers for the IPOD or any other music device (see above) -you should be able to hear them

calendar and marker

bug zapper

The previous night just eat a light meal early in the evening. As much as possible don’t eat meat. It would only serve to slow your stomach’s digestion and would result in you going to bed bloated.

Switch on your speakers and set your alarm clock in your IPOD to play an energizing playlist on your desired time everyday. Mine’s on an 80s playlist. Put a regular time for your mobile phone’s alarm clock in preparation for the detox period. After this, you can make do without it. You can also choose to set your speakers near or far away from you. Mine’s just next to me on the dresser. When it plays the music, I don’t have any desire to switch it off because I like listening to it. Sometimes I even get out of bed just to dance to some pop tracks. It’s a great way of waking up in the morning!

Experiment on what kind of sound would you like to listen to early in the am. News? Classical music? Jazz? Preferably it should be something upbeat. You don’t want to get back to sleep, don’t you?

Set your IPOD and alarm clock to blare on the desired time everyday. This tells your body that you’re showing commitment.

Don’t allow anything to stand between you and your goal. I’ve bought myself a bug zapper because of the super annoying mosquitoes that won’t stop buzzing near my ear when I go to sleep.

When you wake up, the JUST DO IT! sign across from you will only serve to give you that extra push to get out of bed. Then cross off the day on your calendar and give yourself a mental pat on the back for a job well done. I highly recommend writing about your trial to show you what went wrong and what went right. It has been highly beneficial to me because it shows me my weakness and I could then make adjustments to what I’ve been doing before, steering me towards the finish line of my goal.

Lastly, don’t wait for any unnecessary stuff besides the date, your health, your situation and stuff that would delay you. If you’re really sincere about pursuing this goal then, JUST DO IT!

Materials:

IPOD (with the option to play your playlist as the alarm goes off) or any MP3 player/CD player/stereo/radio or any other device in with a built in alarm feature in which music will play when it goes on

Speakers

JUST DO IT sign

Personal development articles

alarm clock
the occasional sleeping pill

calendar

black marker

bug zapper

Did this ever happened to you?

Your alarm blares at 6AM. You wake up groaning. You can’t wait to shut the infernal noise. You toss around and your hand hovers over the empty space on the dresser. Oh wait, you had put it in a place far from you the night before as an attempt for you to finally get up.

You locate the source of the noise. It’s on a chair a few feet from the bed. After navigating the dark labyrinth of your bedroom, you successfully shut the damn thing off. Then you remembered you’ve set your second alarm in the bathroom. You went there to switch it off.

Now it’s quiet. You’re in the bathroom. You contemplate whether to wash your face. After all, you’re already here. Then your body sweetly whispers how nice it would be to go back to sleep. After all your class isn’t until 11AM and you only had 6 hours of sleep today. You try to silence it but it persists. You look longingly back to bed.

You climb back into the comfortable warm sheets. Well, maybe just a few minutes of shut eye wouldn’t hurt. You closed your eyes.

Next thing you know your friend’s calling you demanding where you are. It’s 11AM.

Welcome to my world.

Are you one of those people who no matter how much willpower they try they just couldn’t get out of bed? Who sleep is so important and oh so, overpowering? I mean, we just love our sleep. It’s just so nice to close your eyes and enter the sandman’s realm.

I’ve had too much of my share of the above scenario. No matter how much I try or what techniques I pull I couldn’t seem just to stay out of bed. I would always say 1 more hour of sleep wouldn’t hurt. I gotta get back to sleep again. All of these would result in oversleeping and missing my desired wake up time. My typical day doesn’t start till noon.

But I still wanted to wake up early. I think you pretty much know the numerous benefits tied to that and I wanted them. It was a pretty tough choice between the two but I’ve decided to put an end to waking up late. The many advantages just outweighed the desire to sleep in.

So here’s my plan to implement it. This time I’m going to make a change and see it through.

Sleep early

Each of us knows the number of sleep hours our bodies need. Mine is 7-8, any less than that and I’ve got system failure though I could do 6 but rarely.

Give an hour or 30 minutes time for you to unwind and get ready for bed. No matter what you must cease any activity that will keep you up. That means don’t do any more work!

My weakness before while doing my early attempts to wake up early was to stay up and work late into the night because I thought I wouldn’t get my tasks done the next day. It was a mistake I stubbornly cling to over and over again. I was deluding myself. If the tasks were urgent, I could them do them early in the morning. After I’ve realized what an obstinate fool I was and gave up this habit, getting up early in the morning became easier.

If you can’t sleep, it’s time for you to pop a sleeping pill. This will help you set your body’s clock to sleep at a time that will be sufficient enough for you to get the rest you need. Soon an amazing thing will happen. Your body will naturally set out sleep signals at an early time and you won’t need those pills anymore. They just artificially create a habit for your body to zonk out. Like I used to sleep at 1AM and I wanted to wake up at 7. My body wouldn’t shut down even though I was already lying in bed since 11PM. The outcome? I couldn’t wake up at the desired time because I lacked sleep. 2 pill popping days later, I was immediately sleepy at 11 and could wake up with little effort.

Now here comes the hard part…

Waking up early

The most important ingredient: patience.

Know your limit. If you normally get up at 8AM, don’t immediately set your alarm at 5AM. But can you get up at 7? Sure.

Start from there and work your way up slowly.

Maybe you can get up at 7AM for 2 weeks. Then slowly shave off a couple of minutes every 2 weeks.

Like my goal is to wake up at 5AM but I would normally get up either at 7-9AM during work days. Come holidays, I would oscillate between 8-11AM. So I’ve decided to cement the habit of getting up at 7AM first beforelaborously working my way up to 5. Baby steps. Too much change and you would grow discourage and the habit wouldn’t be properly set in. Think of it as a foundation for a building. Put up a flimsy base and the structure will just collapse like matchsticks. But set up a firm one and the building will be strong.

Get a calendar and a marker – the 30 day trial

I’ve decided to set a firm base by committing to do a 30 day trial of waking up at 7AM. I so badly wanted to start waking up at 6 but I squelch such desires. That was the reason why I failed my earlier attempts at getting up early before. I set up too high a bar and I end up disappointing myself too many times. This only got me burned out.

So you get a black tip marker and cross out the days when you’ve successfully achieved your goal. After I was past day 5 of my trial, I didn’t want to miss an uncrossed day. It can present your progress and I look forward with relish at crossing a day off. Because as Steve Pavlina points out, after 30 days you don’t have to do it anymore. And if you slack off you have to start all over again so think about it. You don’t want all those Xs to go to waste, right?

THE DETOX PERIOD – the initial stage

Like any diet, I believe a new habit process has its own detox stage where the body releases all natural resistance and try its damnest to thwart the new change you’re forcing upon it.

The first week of any habit implementation is usually the hardest but once you’re past that, it’s all smooth sailing.

Picture this scenario.

You wake up.

Your body groans.

You’re severely tempted to burrow yourself under the covers and get back to bed.

DON’T!

All of your hard earned effort will be lost with one day. Just one day. And your body will get off track. Habit implementation is a delicate process. It’s kinda like creating a new invention or a cell and anything you do will play a part in its initial stages of growth. When a habit’s growing, it’s sensitive, delicate and prone to change. If you don’t keep constant vigilance, if you don’t keep watch and feed it for a night, you’ll wake to discover in the morning it’s gone –kaput and you’ll have to start all over again.

Until you finished the trial, you can’t sleep in because the habit isn’t cemented yet. It’s still an infant. It has to grow strong.

In the initial stage when you’ve just started, your body is going through an adjustment phase. It’s confused. It’s out of whack with its routine so it’s scurrying around trying to get things the way they were. It’s like an undisciplined child so you have to toughen up and be firm with it. Once your body sees that nothing it can do will sway you, that you unrelentlingly purse your habit, it will bow down and obey you.

At first it will do all means to get you back into bed. Keep in mind that this adjustment phase is just temporary. It can last anytime from 3 days to more than a week. In my case it took 3 days for me to get up wide awake and alert. I still have some days where it was hard getting up but not as excruciatingly difficult as before. Now I can’t fathom the idea of not getting up at 7. In fact I feel uncomfortable doing so. This is the goal I was leading up to.

My first 2 attempts (the beginning of the trial!) were failures and I only barely succeeded waking up on the 3rd (the first X of the trial). Don’t allow failures to deter and unnerve you. Learn from them.

In those first 2 attempts, I overshot my goal. My first attempt I thought I’d immediately jump ahead to the big fish: 5AM. Big mistake. I woke up at 10. So fine. Humbled, I decided to make it at 6AM.

I woke up at 7:30AM.

Analyzing these later, I realized I was just committing the same mistake I did before. Overestimating what I can do. So let’s see. I’ve been waking up at 7AM before so let’s start from there. I had naturally woken up at 7:30 so the former shouldn’t be a big problem.

The next day, I woke up grouchy and complaining and berating myself for my own self inflicted torture as I trudge towards the bathroom.

Success.

Read the continuation: How to Wake Up Early Plan Part 2

How I chronicled my 30 day trial in waking up early: Waking Up Early- Day 1 

“You’ve got it!” my manager said.

“Really?!” I squealed. I jumped up and down. I was offered a deal to have my own album. At the back of my mind, I knew I couldn’t really sing but did that really matter?

The phone in my hand rang.

“Answer it!”

I was excited. I flipped the phone open.

It continued ringing.

Huh?

I opened my bleary eyes to see my actual mobile blaring. Damn. So it was all a dream?

It was 2:40 AM. There were 4 missed calls and it came from only one person.

Groan.

The stalker’s back again.

Last year I had this increasingly annoying guy who would bug the hell out of me. Text messaging. Emails. Phone calls on my mobile. Fed up, I put my phone in silent mode and after a few hours, it read 21 missed calls –all from him. Crazy!

He’s a nocturnal creature too and would call when I and the rest of the world are asleep. I’ve ignored him to no avail. I thought for sure that escaping to a foreign country would put a stop to it because of the high prices for international calls. And for a while it did (note for those with future stalkers: moving to another country might be extreme for putting an end to stalking but trust me it works.). Then the minute I stepped into my hometown’s soil, he’s started calling me. It’s as if he’s got a trace up on my number or something. Does he have a satellite dish somewhere that tracks me down? Bad enough I live in a country where they ‘keep’ tabs of you, your mails and calls but to actually have a trace on you wherever you go –and by one person no less? That bites!

Because I woke up in the middle of the night I had a hard time getting up this morning. So waking up at those ungodly hours does play a part. I could only count with one hand how many times I’ve woken up wide awake and alert.

I’m not put off by this setback. This is the second day after all since coming here and usually (from observing this trial) if my sleep schedule is off track it takes 3-4 days (gulp) to right itself.

Also, I could’ve slept earlier these past few das if I wasn’t busy being asked to fill insurance and credit card forms and scan my passport. Sure they could be defered later where I had more time during the day but my flight for Singapore leaves next Monday so I’ve only got limited time. Anyway, the end of those tasks was yesterday so I might just be able to get to bed at 10:30 tonight.

Proposed solutions:

1. switch off mobile to prevent stalker from calling

2. tell stalker off

3. sleep before or at 11:20 PM.