Start Waking Up Naturally Every Day

If you had the ideal life, you’d have enough money, enough love, enough fun—and be able to wake up naturally feeling great every day.

You wouldn’t need an alarm clock.

Getting jarred out of bed isn’t pleasant. Yet, for many, it’s necessary. If you’re not awakened that way, you’ll be late for the rest of your day.

If you woke up on your own, unprompted, you’d know you had gotten enough sleep. You might wake up a little early and lie still in bed. You might think about the different things in your life, maybe recount the things you have to be grateful for (sometimes you have to search for it). Waking up naturally, you’d plan your day, prioritizing among competing interests. You might start with meditation or prayer. Whatever.

Starting your day off without an alarm is a good start. It’s calm, focused, and in control.

Being jolted awake by a blaring alarm app on your phone isn’t ideal. The clanging bell of a wind-up alarm clock might sound more “natural” (whatever that means) as opposed to the phone app but

You might have stress during the day. Stress isn’t always bad. It keeps things interesting. The wrong kind of stress the first thing in the morning is a terrible way to start the day.

You deserve better.

Waking up naturally, every day, is great and might be what you didn’t know you needed in your life.

The question is how to get there?

Get enough sleep

“Getting enough sleep” can seem like a moving target. Sometimes bedtime seems to be under assault from friends, family, your job, others, and even yourself. You think, let me do just this one thing more. Watch one more video. Do one more this or that. It’s too much. You’re cheated out of sleep.

Then, when you’re sick or stressed, you may need more sleep than you normally do.

The sleep deficit grows.

If your health is good, however, working on getting in the habit of going to sleep at an hour that works for you as far as getting that seven or eight hours almost everyone needs.

If you go to bed at 10 o’clock at night, you’ll take about a half hour to fall asleep making it 10:30. In the morning you’d be in line to wake up around 6. Getting to bed an hour earlier or later changes the wake-up time accordingly.

For starters, figure on needing at least seven-and-a-half hours of sleep. Some people need more, others less, but that’s a good place to start.

This may require reviewing the kinds of things you do every day. Look at how you can take care of them by a certain deadline so that you’re free to wind down before bed.

It might seem painfully obvious, but to get enough sleep you need to make sure to dedicate enough time to it.

Physical activity

The physical activity that you might do during the day might be exercise. Or it might be work.

Whatever it consists of, however, is moving your body around to expend energy in a way that lets you fall asleep.

Unless you’re debilitated, sitting in a chair behind a computer isn’t going to even begin to tire you out. You’ve got to be more physical than that.

Modern life doesn’t exactly encourage people to move. In old days, it was just part of life. These days, we have to be more conscientious about it.

Move. Do some physical work during the day.

Get some sun

To many the sun is made out to be an enemy. It isn’t. It’s something that makes life possible on our planet.

People go to extremes. The sun is a good thing, and it’s possible to get too much of a good thing. Sunbathing isn’t a good idea. It’s hard on the skin. It also can be related to skin cancer.

Yet, spending as little as 10 minutes a day in indirect sun can help your circadian clock work.

If your curtains are closed tightly, and you’re never getting to see the sun, that’s going to affect your ability to sleep. Living like that, you might as well be living in a cave far underground. Of course that’s going to affect your ability to sleep.

Try it!

Then, finally, it’s a matter of actually trying to wake up without an alarm clock. Going to bed and falling asleep while trusting that you’re going to sleep well enough and long enough to wake up on your own. Make the morning into something you look forward to—at least for the first few hours anyway.

It’s not complicated; it’s not impossible

There they are. Budget enough time for sleep. Move. Get some sun. Try to do it. They’re simple steps that apply to everyone.

There are, of course, special situations. In order to wake up naturally every day, you might have to do something to address them.

Taking these three simple steps is a good start, however, and if they don’t work within a week, it’s a good idea to find a sleep coach to work with. You can wake up naturally. You deserve to wake up naturally.

 

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