I’d always been a night owl. Burning the midnight oil until daft o clock in the morning, waking when the clock hits double digits. But one day, I decided to change.
When you’re sleeping, as needed as that sleep is, you’re not productive. Now, I’m not saying you don’t need sleep or that you should cut down your sleep to an unhealthy level. What I’m saying is that, if you are, like I was, getting more than 8 hours sleep per night, then you can trim that down in order to give you more time awake. More time living.
So, when I started taking writing seriously in 2014, I realised that I didn’t have any time in the day to actually do it. I’d wake at 8am, jump in the shower and head to work. After work, it’d be socialising and spending time with Gemma. So where can I find time?
Mornings.
Ugh, but I hate mornings. I’m so not a morning person. But, I wanted to be.
I had this idea that I could be one of those people who woke up before sunrise and spent a few hours getting a jump start on the day. A few hours of productivity while everyone else is in bed.
So I set myself a mission: to become a morning person.
To do that, I knew that I needed something, some hack, that would force me out of bed in the morning and so I went through a series of efforts to make this happen consistently. Here’s what I tried and what worked.
Attempt 1: alarm placement
The first thing I tried was to place my phone, my alarm, at the other side of the bedroom. This way, when the alarm goes off at 5am, I have to get out of bed to turn it off. Surely, once I’m out of bed, I’ll just be up?
Well, for the first few days, yes. This works. But as soon as you realise that you can just turn the alarm off and head straight back to bed again, you’re f*cked.
Attempt 2: walking
I then found an alarm app that makes you walk 30 steps before it’ll turn off. Yep, that’s right. Your alarm will not turn off, no matter what you do, until you’ve walked 30 paces.
To combine the effect, I still left my phone at the other end of the room, so that I’d have to get out of bed, grab my phone, then walk 30 paces.
This worked like a dream… For a while.
On those mornings when you really don’t want to get out of bed, you’ll try anything to turn that alarm off. Including laying in bed holding your phone and waving your arm around to simulate walking. And, it worked!
So, once you’ve found out you can hack that, you’re f*cked again.
Attempt 3: the process
After some searching, I then found the ultimate alarm app. I think it was called Alarmy. It’s in the Apple App Store now, but it’s changed since I used it, though it looks like you can still accomplish the same results.
Essentially, the way it worked is that, before you go to bed, you’d have to take a photograph. Then, when the alarm goes off, you’d have to retake that same photograph. It used machine learning to determine whether the photographs were the same and the alarm wouldn’t stop until you’ve taken the exact same photo.
For me, I took a photo of my computer, the furthest thing away from my bed in the apartment, and the thing I wanted to end up at after I woke up so that I could write.
I took the photo at night, with the living room light on, so that when I woke up, I’d have to turn the light on again to recreate the image and hopefully wake me up a little more.
So, before I went to bed, I’d take the photo. Leave my phone at the other end of the room. Then, the alarm goes off, I’m out of bed, grab the phone, head to the living room, turn the light on, take the photo. Job done.
But that’s not all.
With the alarm still ringing, you’d then have to play a mentally challenging game and complete three rounds of it. Games like Tetris, or the memory game where you need to remember the colours shown, then recreate the pattern.
But that’s not all.
You’d then have to check off items on a ‘to do’ list. For me, this was 1. put the kettle on, 2. write.
Then, the alarm would turn off. At that point, you’re stood at the other end of the apartment in the light and have been awake for a good few minutes.
“This sounds horrific” I can hear you think. It is. It’s horrible. Some mornings, you just want to die. But the thing is, it works. You can not turn that alarm off until you’ve done those things, and once you’ve done those things, regardless of how angry you are, you’re awake.
Steve Peters in his book, The Chimp Paradox, talks about how, to control yourself, or to fight your impulses, you need to control your chimp. One of the things that can control your chimp is to intercept it before it has chance to fire up. That’s what this alarm does. Before you have a chance to think “oh sod it, I’ll snooze”, you’re already in the living room with the light on trying to remember the composition of the photo you took the night before.
It just works. I’m now a morning person and have been for nearly 10 years. I’m just waiting for my kids to grow up a bit so that I can use that alarm again without waking the whole house up!