Every bad period has their silver linings. In the celebration post for My Story Of I’s 4th anniversary I said that last year I crashed. Obviously this did not fit with my personal development plan that I started in 2016. One of the things that completely fell apart was my will to leave my bed. So I started searching for ways to get out of bed and google never fails to disappoint. Now, about a year later, I am here to rapport what I found and what actually works in terms of successfully getting you out of bed. Rest assured all that is to come has been tested by me and is still used by me in variation depending on how I am feeling health wise.
6 Tips To Help You Get Out Of Bed Easier
1. Put Your Alarm Clock On The Other Side Of The Room
The alarm clock hack or tip, a classic in the world of tips to get out of bed. I have heard about it so many times and always turned my nose up at it. I mean I am able to just get up, turn the alarm off and turn around and leap right back into bed. Jump sliding into bed is a wonderful activity anyways, every ‘90’s girl romcom lover loves that, including me. You can already guess it, that is exactly what happened. Got up, turned the alarm off and jumped slided back into bed. Of course, I had to modify this tip to actually work. I made three modifications to make this get out of bed lifehack work:
Modification #1: instead of putting your alarm on the other side of the room, put it right outside of your room or near the door of your bedroom. For me this worked as I was already near the door I might as well keep going. I have to admit that your mindset does play a big role in this working.
Modification #2: what worked even better was to make sure my slippers were nowhere to be found near my bed. The first thing I do when I put my feet down next to my bed is plop into/search for my slippers. Not having them near your bed means you have to get up to go after the alarm and immediately, perhaps more importantly, go after your slippers to seal in the warmth of the bed. Cold feet are horrendous! Well, that’s if you ask me. It’s best to put your slippers a tad further than the alarm so you have to keep going so you might as well make your way to the bathroom and get your day started. This modification made the tip work twice as well for me.
Modification #3: basically the same as the slipper work around. I put my bathrobe also near my slippers so I need to walk all the way to the other side of my bedroom to lock in the bed warmth and turn off the alarm.
2. Wake Up With A Dim light
Have you ever had someone turn on the light while you were still waking up? Horrendous ain’t it? Perfect! Listen, My Story Of I is still all about learning to love yourself and celebrating your life however to do that you need to get out of bed. I know turning on the lights is horrendous, so I have a midway solution. Get yourself a dim light. I have had mine for, I think, 3 or 4 years and it is wonderful.
Basically what you do is turn it on immediately after you turn off your alarm, so it is best to keep those two together. The dim light will wake you up sufficiently for you to not want to get back to bed as you are already awake. However it won’t wake you up annoyingly by shining the sun in your face. Swap out the sun for any and every bright light you have in your home. In conclusion you’ll be awake, but not annoyed. Great!
I do know of this two in one alarm where your alarm is a dim light that goes on slowly, quite like the sunrise, to wake you up. I, myself, have not tried one of those as I had nowhere to put it in my bedroom. Also, I’m very happy with my current dim light and the last thing I wanted was to figure out how to set a proper alarm.
Yes, I know shame on me that I don’t know how to do that. I have just used my phone as an alarm for as long as I can remember. Also, I do not need to be struggling with something that is capable of making noise at any given hour when set up wrong. Not a problem I want to have, ever.
3. Change Your Alarm Tone To Startle Your Senses
I have said before that humans are creatures of habit, so the following will come as no surprise to you. If you have had the same alarm tone forever you are probably used to it and thus better adapt to tuning it out. The fact that you are better at tuning it out means you are far more likely to stay in your bed instead of getting out of bed. The way to remedy this and get you on your way to productive starts of your days is to change your alarm tone.
The very first morning that I did this the very first question that came to mind when I was rudely awakened by the sound was; What the hell is that? Which is the exact effect you want. Just be mindful when changing your alarm tone that you don’t change it to something sounding actually annoying. Something might have a nice ring to it at 3.00 PM but it might be a horrendous morning sound. My current alarm is the birdsong from the iPhone bedtime options. Do know that you can’t choose this alarm tone when scheduling a normal alarm.
4. Mel Robbins Countdown To Get Out Of Bed
I am sure you have heard of Mel Robbins but if you haven’t; she is a motivational speaker that came out with the book ‘’The 5 Second Rule’’. Well her tip to get out of bed in a timely manner is to countdown from 5 to 1 and then simply get up. This countdown is based on the science that your brain supposedly kills an idea after, you guessed it, 5 seconds. I personally have not read her book but I have, of course, tried this technique and it actually works. I find that it works because it gives you a clear indication on when you are going to get up.
For me it is a variant on the deals you make with yourself of ‘’I’ll get up in 1 minute’’ or ‘’I’ll get up at X.00AM’’ but you never do because you miss the hour mark and then decide that you need to wait till the next clean cut hour. I know those tricks all too well. While with this get out of bed countdown technique you are actively busy preparing yourself to actually get out of bed. So there is no waiting and risking that you fall back asleep.
5. The Morning Motivation Question
I have discussed this tip in great length here and mentioned it in the intro briefly but you can’t live your life if all you do is stay in bed. Granted in our modern day society there are a lot of things you can arrange with a few clicks on your phone however actual dream life living? I have doubts. Realizing this you have to thus start the day by reminding yourself this. You can do this rather simply by putting on a post-it on/next to your alarm clock (for me my phone) with the following question:
‘’You now have two options; either stay in bed and dream your dream or get up and make sure you live your dream. What is it going to be?’’.
DCPR.
The answer is obvious, live the dream so then you can relive your dreams as memories while dreaming.
If you are thinking of starting a morning routine alongside trying these waking up tips, make sure you read this post first before negatively impacting your mornings and/or entire days. You’re welcome!
6. Delete The Snooze Button
This tip only applies if you use your phone as your alarm clock. If you set a regular alarm clock you can easily delete the snooze option thus leaving you with two options. Either the option of turning off your alarm and actually getting up or turning off your alarm and being late. The only downside to this is if you were to use the bedtime function on the iPhone you for some, bizarro unexplainable basically super rude, reason can’t do this. It might not be clear but I do use the bedtime function on my iPhone, because it helps me track my sleep.
On the iPhone you can do this really easily in the settings of the alarm. The snooze function is the last setting of the four. There you have a little slider that you can slide to the left to make sure you don’t see a snooze function anymore for that specific alarm. You do have to do this again for every alarm you set. Except for the bedtime alarm as there the option does not exist, unfortunately. I couldn’t tell you the specifics of how to do this on Android as I do not own an Android phone, but below you can find the guides I found for Apple and Android.
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| Apple Settings | Android Settings |
That is all the get out of bed tips and tricks I have that I tried that actually work. I have of course tried more but they really didn’t do much if anything at all. For example I have tried drinking a glass of water immediately after waking up. They recommend this because you’ll feel refreshed and ready to start the day productively. It is correct that I felt refreshed but not refreshed enough to get up and start my day. Also one morning I knocked over the glass and I almost needed a new phone..(insert eye roll).
Another one I have tried is adjusting the room temperature, however that was horrendous. If you identify with the following then I strongly advise against doing that. I was cold when the temperature changed during the night, thus woke up in the middle of the night unable to fall asleep again. This, unfortunately happened for several nights. I never got used to it. It might work for you if you can handle the temperature change because it will certainly get you out of bed. Mainly to go change the thermostat and get a blanket if you are like me. I won’t bore you with more fail stories, but once I have more wins I will add those to the list above. Hopefully these start your day tips will already help you along!
Let’s get up, start the day and make our dream life our real life.
Love,
DCPR.
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