How to wake up in the morning when you don’t want to

We’ve all had those days when our body feels too heavy for us to lift it out of the bed. Not every day do you feel the need to get up and hustling feels like an overrated concept on such days. However, not all of us have the privilege to lie down in bed all day and do nothing. But what if your willpower to rise up early in the morning doesn’t coincide with the physical strength in your body to actually execute upon the same? Here are some science-backed hacks to trick your body and mind to take actionable steps towards waking up fresh and active and conquer the day ahead.

1. Ditch your coffee:

Drinking coffee late in the afternoon and consuming more coffee than necessary can decrease the quality and quantity of your sleep.

Research suggests that drinking coffee even 6 hours before bedtime can cause such sleep deterioration.

Replace your regular coffee with the alternatives given below (psst…they’re healthier too!)

• Macha tea
• Green tea
• Smoothies
• Apple cider vinegar
• Chicory coffee
• Black tea

2. Leave the screen out of the scene:

The hormone responsible for making us feel drowsy and putting us to sleep is called melatonin. Blue light being emitted from screens we use on the daily reduces the release of melatonin, thus disrupting our sleep cycle.

It is essential to avoid using phone, laptop, television etc. in the night as much as possible. Here are a few hacks that can help you reduce the time you spend on screen.

• Remove gadgets from your surroundings at night and pick up some other activity to do before going to sleep such as reading a light novel.
• Use a table alarm clock instead of using the one in your phone so you do not have the option to hit snooze.
• Keep phone in a separate room 1 hour before sleeping.
• In cases where using your phone or tablet at night is unavoidable, use night mode which dims the brightness and decreases the emission of blue-light.

3. Sweat it out:

To wake up fresh, one needs a deep comfortable sleep the night before. However, enemies of sleep such as anxiety and depression leave you too drained to get out of the bed in the morning.

Studies have shown that exercise helps mitigate anxiety and depression and improves our overall mood.

When we exercise, our body releases endorphins which are chemicals that help relieve pain and stress in our body. As a result of these chemicals, your body tends to feel more relaxed, thus improving the quality of your sleep.

4. Cold shower helps:

Who doesn’t love a steamy warm shower in the morning? While a warm water shower helps you calm down, it doesn’t really help you to stay alert and energized throughout the day.

Replacing it with cold shower on the other hand can significantly improve your wakefulness in the morning.

Every time you take a cold shower, your body releases norepinephrine, a hormone that helps keep the brain on alert mode. This promotes wakefulness and mitigates morning fatigue.

5. Stick to a routine:

Let’s go back to our sleepy hormone melatonin once again.

If you usually sleep at, say 11pm, you brain will release this hormone to make you feel drowsy and put you to sleep.

If you wake up at, say 7am in the morning, a hormone called cortisol aka body’s in-built alarm gets released and puts you in a wakeful state thus helping you wake up.

If one day you decide to go to bed at a different time than usual, you brain assumes that you must be awake due to a stressful situation. It puts your body in fight or flight mode to protect you against a threat which doesn’t even exist.

It does so by releasing stress hormones, which eventually reduce the quality of the sleep you get. Thus, sticking to a routine makes sense.

Try going to bed and waking up around your usual timings even if it’s the weekend or an exam and your hormones will thank you for it.

Conclusion:

Morning fatigue persists for greater part of our day and slows us down considerably. However, you can beat it. Sure, sticking to rigid habits seem boring at first and getting started will be a hard row to hoe, but it sure will be rewarding in the long run. How your day starts is directly proportional to how you wake up. Hence, waking up fresh and energetic comes in handy when you set out to seize the day.