Be Intentional Baby Step #2 – Try To Wake Up At The Same Time Everyday

If you don’t know what our Be Intentional Baby Steps are all about, read up on it HERE so that this all makes sense to you 🙂

You might have seen this one coming after yesterday’s baby step of Set and Keep a Consistent Bedtime Each Day.  In that step, we talked about how crucial it is for your body, your health and ultimately your overall energy, productivity and efficiency to be consistent with a bed time.  Well…. the same is true of wake up times as well!

Your body really, really needs to get it’s clock straight to function at the best capacity that it can. If you sleep in one day, wake up early the next, wake up an hour later than before, etc. your body does not respond well to this pattern.  You body needs and craves this time of resting and resting consistency.

Baby Step #2 

 

Try and Work Towards Waking Up at the Same Time Everyday, Including Weekends

No one is saying that you have to go to bed early and wake up early. In fact, for some people, their efficiency comes at night. Just make it consistent!

Now we will say, for most people, morning is a crucial productive time! It certainly is for us! That’s when we get most of our blogging and our best
brain work” done.

If you want an early wake-time (ours is 5:30am), we recommend not shocking your body into it, but easing into it by 10, 15 or even 20 minute increments.  Same with children.  In order to get our kids going back to bed at a reasonable time, we have to wake them earlier and earlier each day.  We once tried to “jolt” them awake – BAD IDEA! Ease them into it – ease yourself into it!

Easing into it also allows you to develop this as a habit easier.  Honestly, for us, going to bed at a consistent time isn’t so hard…. it’s the waking up early that is 🙂

Choose your new wake-up time goal wisely! Here’s some things to consider when you choose your time.

1. Medical and health professionals claim that an adult needs between 6 – 8 hours of sleep a night, so weigh this against your bed time to decide.
2. If you are not currently exercising or doing something physical for health, make room for even a small 10-15 minute workout.
3. Are you productive in the am? If so, adjust your bed time and wake time to give yourself more of it before your day starts! For us, any time we can get work done before kids wake is super important.  Efficiency and productivity decrease dramatically when any of the kids wake up!

Alex wakes at 5 am because he works four 10-hour days for his contractor so that he can take 1-day a week off and to be home to homeschool for one day a week! He also doesn’t want to get home super late, so we adjusted our time to where his extra 2 hours were in the morning!

Here’s a few things that has helped us get out of bed on time:

• Build up to it, don’t shock your body by all of the sudden getting up a lot earlier than you normally do.
• Get up at that time on the weekends too! We love having early Saturday and Sunday mornings! They are nice, relaxing and make for much less stress even on those days.  Plus, when Monday’s hit, it isn’t so awful 🙂
• Try a gradual sweet sounding alarm. We made this change last year and we highly recommend it! For years, we have used those “shock your body awake” alarms and they just seem so stressful now.  We have an alarm that starts off a few minutes before we wish to wake and it is very gentle relaxing sounds, like birds chirping, etc. and then gradually gets louder and louder. It is a much more pleasant way to wake up!

Finally, we have heard about the wake lights many, many times before but haven’t jumped on that bandwagon yet.  We are curious to hear if anyone has good experiences with them!?! 

Also, we know talk about getting up at a normal wake time or even an earlier wake time if you see fit for your schedule doesn’t sound all that pleasing and restful.  Well, in Reading Rainbow style, you don’t have to take our word for it.  We found hundreds of other sites, blogs and articles talking about the amazing difference their lives were with consistent and often early wake up times.  So you can read some of these things we found from the links below:

• 10 Advantages of Waking Up Early from Shine.Yahoo.com
• Why the ‘early bird’ is happier and healthier in life from Telegraph.co.uk
• Health Benefits of Waking Up Early from B4Tea.blogspot.com
• Wake Up Earlier For A Happier, Healthier Life [Study] from Inquisitr.com
• 7 Reasons Why You Should Wake Up Early from Stronglifts.com
• Get Up, Be Happier: 3 Painless Ways to Wake Up Early from News.Health.com

So…now is the moment of truth, 

What time do you plan to get up? 

Don’t forget to join us at our Be Intentional with The Thrifty Couple Facebook Group HERE. We highly encourage you to ask to join so that we can communicate and encourage everyone.  It is intended to be a small and intimate group as we develop relationships with our readers, talk back and forth and ask questions! We are excited about this new avenue and hope you will find it encouraging too!