For most of us going to work forces us to wake up much earlier than we would like. I’ll show you how I managed to wake up at ungodly hours and actually grew to like it.

So regardless of whether you are a morning person or a night owl, it’s very likely you’re going to have to wake up earlier than you’re used to.

So how can you make this as painless as possible?

It all comes up to something called “Sleep Hygiene”. Now the sleep hygiene are your behaviors and patterns leading up until your sleep. It’s every action you take leading up until that big moment of peaceful rest. With a good hygiene you will be able to sleep faster and maintain a high quality sleep. But I’m not going to show a detailed sleep hygiene routine, instead I’m going to show you what I think are the key factors to waking up early without wanting to kill myself.

My name is Ben, and I’m a full-time procrastinator. I tried to wake up at 7 AM every day, but it was an uphill battle, until I decided to start changing small habits. Wisest. Choice. Ever.

I used to have a messed up sleeping routine, I had no consistency with my bed time and wake up time. I had to do something. I decided to start using a sleeping routine. I started investigating and familiarizing with different stages of seep. That’s the moment I found this amazing app called SleepyTime. This website manages your sleep cycles. How does it work?

You start by setting your wake up time

And it tells you at what time you should fall asleep so you don’t interrupt your sleep cycle.

The reason the snooze button can be bad for rest is related to the different stages of sleep. Alarms often interrupt the brain during crucial moments of rest. This drives your desire to hit the snooze button.

The sleeping cycle consists of 5 stages that usually repeat about 3 or 4 times during the night. The REM sleep is the deepest stage of this cycle. The body has a natural clock that regulates sleeping and waking, and about an hour before we need to be up, we start moving out of REM sleep in preparation for morning. Sleep gets lighter, temperature rises, and hormones designed to spark energy are released.

If we don’t have a normal sleep/wake cycle, our alarm clocks often cut REM sleep short and we wake up before our bodies have begun preparing for morning. This often results in people feeling tired or jolted, and hitting the snooze button for added sleep.

If you wake up during REM sleep, then hit snooze, you may return to deep sleep mode. Waking from deep sleep mode before moving through a lighter sleep stage may shock our bodies. This is known as sleep inertia. Hitting the snooze button doubles the impact, causing feelings of grogginess later in the day.

So it’s better to set the alarm to the exact time you are going to wake up. If you set your alarm for 7:00 AM but you always snooze it ‘til 7:20 AM, simply set your alarm directly to 7:20 AM.

But hey, a nail is driven out by another nail; habit is overcome by habit.