Table of contents for Morning Routines

  1. Morning Routines - Part 1: Waking Up


Photo courtesy of Inspiration-for-singles.com

Everybody has to do it. Every day. Waking up and getting started early can be one of the most important determinants of how your day will pan out. For many, there are those days when you feel like jumping out bed and tackling the next thing on your “to-do list” and then others where you wonder how you’ll ever muster up the energy to crawl out of bed.

Well I have two tips that have gone a long way towards having more experiences of the former.

Waking up with the Sun (or Next Best Thing)

We know from reading Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival (what? you haven’t read it? this is some serious recommended reading), that light is intimately tied up with our hormones including the ones that will get you out of bed in the morning.

So ideally this is pretty simple. Just situate your bed so that there is a view through your window and when the sun comes up it will cue your brain that its time to wake up.

However, the tricky thing for most of us is that when the sun goes down, the light doesn’t go away thanks to lingering light from street lights, neighbours, cars, etc. Unless you’re fortunate enough to live in a spot without any artificial light outside, you’re best bet is to cover your windows with heavy drapes. That presents the problem of it still being dark in your room when its time to wake up. Not to mention the fact that its not always practical for scheduling reasons to get up when the sun rises.

Here is an option that I originally came across on Dr. Mercola’s site, a “sun alarm clock“. These things have a bulb that dims on leading up to the time you set your alarm to go off. So even if your room is completely dark otherwise, you can ease yourself into the light at setting varying from a 30-120 minute sunrise. Pretty neat stuff. You can also get an adapter to hook in any additional light for more of an effect. I’ve been happy with the Soleil Sunrise Alarm Clock. Although I have had issues with one of the bulbs not going off after I unplug it or the power cuts out. There are others one available, and I found a review roundup by one of my old (since cancelled) childhood favorite shows, CBC’s Street Sense.

That Alarm Sound Everyone Loves

Let’s try to think of a sound to wake up to that will start the day off with as much stress as possible…okay I think that would be the default setting on most alarm clocks. Music or a favorite radio station can be a big improvement, but that can still be pretty harsh going from a volume level of nothing to all the sudden loud enough to scare you awake.

Many alarm clocks that have CD players allow you to utilize a setting that plays a CD when the alarm goes off. Even better are the ones that you can hook up to your iPod or other mp3 player. You probably see where I’m going with this. Why not make a custom CD or load up your mp3 player with a song that starts the day off on a note of your choice? Now on the one hand you could go with something along the lines of 2Pac’s “Hit ‘Em Up,” or do what I do and find a favorite “nature sounds” track. What’s even more effective is to open up an an audio track with any audio editing software (Audacity is a free one), and use a fade effect to make the music slowly increase in volume.

Here is an example, a clip (I can’t post the full track for copyright reasons) from an audio track I use daily to slowly ease me back into morning consciousness:
gd_wakeup_track_clip.mp3
(I used “Printemps Au Saguenay” from the late Dan Gibson’s Solitudes: Nature du Quebec album. It’s kind of hard to show the fade in only a 30 second clip (the actual track I use is over 8 minutes long, with over a minute where its barely noticeable), but you get the idea.

Armed with these two wakeup weapons you should be ready to take on the world every morning. Well, you still need to get some sleep. But still.


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