How to Wake Up at 5am: Start Waking Up Early
If you’re wondering how to wake up at 5am and start a productive morning routine for yourself, you’re going to find all the tips you need to get started here.
Wondering how to wake up at 5am?
Then maybe you have heard of the book The 5am Club. Ever since that book came out, it has become so popular, and it has had many people beginning their days at 5am. If you haven’t read it yet, no worries, you’ll be finding some great tips to help get you started in this post!
Waking up early is known to have many wonderful benefits, so it’s no wonder that you’ve found yourself here.
Whether you want to get more out of your day, be more productive, or just have some quiet time to yourself, starting your day a few hours early is great.
You might be wondering how to wake up early in the morning. If you consider yourself a bitt of a night owl, this might feel a bit impossible for you, but I assure you that it’s not! It’s just a matter of getting into the habit.
I myself used to go to bed consistently between 12am-2am and wake up around 10am! These days I’m averaging a wakeup time of around 6-6:30am and a bedtime of 10-11pm! I never thought I’d be able to be an early bird, but here we are. I’m going to share my very best tips with you to help you get there too!
Know Your Why
When you’re planning how to wake up at 5am, you’re going to want to know your why to keep consistent with it.
If you wake up early with your alarm and feel tired and groggy and you don’t have a reason in mind for why you want to get up early, then you’re much more likely to turn over and go back to sleep. Having a solid reason why you want to wake up early to get your day started will help motivate you to get out of bed.
There are many reasons why you might want to wake up early, such as to have some alone time to work out, read, have breakfast in peace, get started on work early so you can end your work days earlier and so on. Whatever your reason, keep it as your motivation to wake up and get up.
Plan Your Day the Night Before
When you start waking up early, it’s really helpful to know how you want your morning to go, so having a list of your morning routine available is a great way to keep on track.
If you wake up a bit aimless, it’ll be a lot easier to waste your time by sitting on your phone, or watching tv or scrolling through social media. Before you know it, you haven’t accomplished what you hoped for and it doesn’t feel like it was worth getting up early.
Planning your morning out the night before will help you have a plan to keep you on track. This way you can be productive right from the start.
Even if your intention with waking up early is just to sit and read, it will make sure that you get out of bed, off of social media, and dedicate your time to the reading task at hand.
Tidy Your Space the Night Before
It feels like such a downer to wake up in the morning and start your day by looking at a mess. When the space around you is out of order or cluttered, it can feel hard to be productive and feel good.
Begin tidying your space the night before so that when you get up in the morning you can feel inspired with your surroundings, which will also help the mornings feel more relaxed, and will help you feel more prepared to take on your day!
Calculate Your New Bedtime to Get Enough Sleep
When you start waking up early, you don’t want to just cut out the amount of sleep you’ve been getting.
For example, let’s say that your usual sleep routine is bedtime at 12am, and wake up is at 8am giving you a solid 8 hours of sleep. If you then decide to start waking up at 5am, you don’t want to keep your bedtime at 12am, because that would cut your average nightly sleep time to just 5 hours a night, which isn’t healthy.
You’d want to calculate backwards, making your new bedtime 9pm. If you feel you don’t need the full 8 hours and you can’t imagine going to bed by 9pm, maybe you’ll find 7 hours of sleep is fine for you.
Do what works for you, but just make sure that you are indeed getting enough sleep, because good sleep is so important for good health!
Slowly Ease Yourself Into Your Wakeup Time
If you find that it’s difficult for you to just hop straight into waking up super early every single morning, you can also ease yourself into it.
Let’s say your current wake up time in the morning is 8am, but you want to transition to 5am, you can begin setting your alarm for half an hour earlier every day.
This will help you transition into your new early wakeup time, and it could help it feel more natural for you. You can also implement this for an earlier bedtime as well where you can begin to go to bed half an hour earlier every night as well.
Create a Morning Routine You Can Look Forward To
Plan something you can look forward to in the mornings so that you can not only manage to pull yourself out of bed, but actually be excited about it!
Whether that’s a breakfast you can look forward to, a brisk walk with the dog, a fun podcast, or going for a coffee run, having something to look forward to not only motivates you to get out of bed, but also starts your day off on a really high note which can help the rest of the day follow suit.
Put Your Phone in Another Room
If your phone is beside your bed in the morning, especially if you use it as your morning alarm, it can be so easy to get sucked into an endless scrolling cycle through social media, the news, texts and more!
Try putting your phone in another room, or at least in a different part of the room so that you can’t get onto it without first getting out of bed. Once you’re up, you may as well start getting ready with your morning routine before then hopping onto any distracting apps.
Put Your Alarm Out of Reach
This is essential if you want to learn how to wake up at 5am, especially in the beginning days!
If your alarm is on your phone, you may want to keep it nearby, but out of reach as I mentioned above so that you will still hear it loud enough to wake you up. If you’re using a separate alarm though, be sure to have it on the other side of the room.
When your alarm clock is right next to your bed, it makes it far too easy and tempting to just hit the snooze button and turn back over. If your alarm is well out of reach, you don’t really have any other choice other than to get out of bed to turn it off.
When your alarm clock is right next to your bed, it makes it far too easy and tempting to just hit the snooze button and turn back over. If your alarm is well out of reach, you don’t really have any other choice other than to get out of bed to turn it off.
Set Your Alarm with a Sound You Enjoy
I personally use my phone as my alarm, and I absolutely hate the sounds that come with the phone. They always wake me up with a jump and I really don’t appreciate that jolt from my sleep.
One way I’ve found super helpful is to set the alarm to a song that I like. When I was in school, I would set the alarm to a current hit song that made me want to dance which would pump me up for the day. Nowadays though, I’ve been using Louis Armstrong’s version of La Vie En Rose, and I find it’s a gentle way to wake up and I’m not as crabby about it as when I’m jolted out by some loud beeping or ringing sound.
Get up with the 5 Second Rule
Using the 5 second rule to get out of bed is a really helpful way to make the decision to get up without allowing you to talk yourself out of it.
Basically you count down in your head 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, then you just get up. Just do it without putting any extra thought into it. You can read more about how to use this process for pretty much anything in life in the book The 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins.
Use a Sunlight Alarm During the Darker Months
Waking up early is much easier when the sun is out because it feels like daytime, so of course this makes waking up easier for about 6 months of the year, but what about the other 6 months or so?
During the winter months, it can feel like drudgery to wake up and get out of the warm blankets, but what if you want to keep up with your early morning routine? Well you can now buy an alarm clock like this one that will begin to glow to emulate the sunrise. You may find this really helpful in the cold, dark winter months.
Have a Consistent Bedtime
Having a consistent bedtime is really important to helping you get into a great early morning routine.
The more you stick to your bedtime, the more easily you will be able to continue with it. Eventually your body will begin telling you that it’s bedtime before you can even look at the clock to tell you.
Have a Consistent Wake Up Time – It Gets Easier
Just as having a consistent bedtime is important, so is having a consistent wakeup time!
The more of a routine you have with this, the more natural it will become.
If you stick with a consistent wakeup time, eventually you will be able to wake up before your alarm goes off, which honestly is the best! It’s so nice to wake up without being jolted out of your sleep, but it also helps you to feel less groggy when you wake up on your own naturally.
Start Your Day with Water
You might want to go running for your coffee as soon as you wake up in the morning, but hold back for a little bit!
When you get up, it’s really best to start your day with water. You could even try some warm lemon water if you want to really help your digestive system!
Having coffee in your body first things isn’t great for it, so try to drink at least a glass of water while your coffee is brewing, or before running out to your local coffee shop.
Accomplish Something First Thing for Positive Momentum
Start your day with some productivity.
Even if you’re wanting to learn how to wake up at 5am just to enjoy some extra time to yourself, check some things off of your list.
Whether you want to take the dog for a walk around the block, do a workout, or just read a chapter of your book. Complete something that you want to accomplish in your mornings. By accomplishing something on your list, it will start your day off with some momentum which can go with you throughout the day and actually help you accomplish more of your important tasks that you have set up throughout the day.
If you had found yourself wondering how to wake up at 5am, I hope you found some of these tips helpful and that you’ll try implementing some of them in your new early bird routine!
