In my last post - “Early to Rise: The Habit of Getting Up Early” I talk about how of waking up early has many positive benefits and probably deserves to be a foundational habit above Eating in a habit hierarchy.

I’ve been researching a lot about it. I was curious if there was anyone who had really nailed down this habit. Although there are many books out there, a lot of the advice is, according to the reviewers, common and not really new.

I’m also currently reading a book called Wake Up: The Early Routine That Will Change Your Life by Jeff Finley, and so far he’s got a lot of good advice that uses a lot of the base science that I base my own project on - studies in Willpower, references to Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, and other self help gurus that I have found helpful in the past. I also found a great post by Nathaniel Eliason entitled Wake Up Early and More: The Only Sleep Article You’ll Need.

A couple bits of advice kept reoccurring through my reading:

-Incremental changes over time are better to ingrain the habit - people suggested changing your alarm clark by 15, 30, or 60 minutes per day.
-Morning and evening routines need to be implemented - Getting up is a function of how you go to sleep
-You should have some time before bed where you are not looking at a computer or tv screen
-Have a morning routine
-Drink a glass of water as soon as you get up
-Figure out some sort of trigger-action-reward system to get you out of bed, like Duhigg describes in The Power of Habit

Some additional things I want to look more into are:
-Drinking a calming tea at a set time at night
-Using Flux, a program that switches the spectrum of light on the screen to help transition to sleep mode.
-Nidra Yoga - a yoga based methodology for achieving deep states of sleep (a forum post on the Dharma Overground suggested THIS SITE, which has a lot of seemingly good explanations and links as to how exactly to practice it.)

I’ve done some of these things - I have flux and have used it. I have a morning routine, I’ve started drinking tea and having a cutoff point for the computer. I do meditation to get to sleep now, though the type I do has thus far caused me to have an unrestful sleep.

Getting up early clearly does have several components - my question is how do I implement this in terms of a TinyHabit, implementation intention, recording, and general protocol? Waking up early may not be as difficult as mastering eating, but it’s definitely difficult, especially for a night owl like me.

But in my reading it is very interesting to see how many people seem to give waking up early primacy to the importance of the habit, and how it connects to so many other foundational habits.