The biggest lie in the world is that it is difficult to wake up early in the morning.
Waking up early (and suddenly) to some awful, pre-loaded alarm tone on your phone is actually easy. You set it the night before with great intentions and then it shakes you awake when the time comes. The bit where you open your eyes? That’s the easy part.
The actual challenge is staying awake. To reach the promised land of full consciousness at a time that you planned with great intentions the night before means you have to overcome not just the warmth of your bed, but also a fully fledged medical phenomenon known as sleep inertia. This refers to the time between awakening and reaching full consciousness. According to this bit of science, it is a distinct, measurable period characterised by the persistence of some features of sleep beyond the point of awakening. For people on the extreme end of the spectrum, this sleep inertia graduates into sleep drunkenness in which the inertia can continue for around 4 hours after waking with reflexes inhibited and a tendency to return to sleep common during that time.
There’s a lot of advice on sleep out there, but much of it focuses on getting to sleep. This is a huge challenge for many, but for others, waking up is the sticking point.
As is the fashion currently, I turned to everyone’s pal, ChatGPT, for its opinion:
Some very solid tips from the chat bot, but only a couple focusing on something that happens in the morning (alarm clocks). It’s true that there is a lot you can put in place the night before to help you to get to sleep (and by extension, stay asleep for longer, making it easier to wake up). But for the sleep drunk, the problem is keeping yourself from falling asleep again after waking up at your pre-planned time.
I think ChatGPT gave good advice, but here’s what works for me:
Having a conducive environment
Like any new routine or desired habit, there is early enthusiasm, but that can wane pretty quickly. Changing the type of alarm or the location of the alarm stops you from autopiloting back to sleep. One night use your phone, the next night use a radio alarm and the next night put the phone in a new location. I’ve recently bought a Philips Hue Light Bar which can be set to turn on and work like a sunrise alarm clock. It gets gradually brighter over a 20 minute period before I’m due to wake up. You can change the colours on it too. It’s nice to keep things fresh. Other popular lighting options seem to be the Lumie alarm clock and the Philips wake up light.
Having an active brain
It always helps to wake up to a good, energising song on the radio. A song that you like that will immediately rouse your brain into motion. But you can’t always rely on DJs to choose well. Instead, lean on apps like Alarmy that get you to complete a task to switch the alarm off. It’s horrific during the moment you’re having to switch it off, but it works. I tried a few of the tasks which include solving a maths problem (awful), doing some squats (also awful but better than maths), shaking your phone 40 times (actually quite effective) and having to scan a pre-chosen bar/QR code of a random item on the other side of the bedroom (my favourite).
As with the previous point on environment, it’s probably most effective to cycle through the various task options to keep you on your toes. Alarmy also has a ‘wake up check’ feature which triggers a few minutes after you’ve disabled the alarm and then gives you 90 seconds to confirm that you’ve stayed up and awake. The central point of this app, though, is to force you to make a rational choice almost immediately after waking up, hopefully causing the sleep inertia to dissipate. There are probably other apps that do similar things and surely it won’t be long until Apple and Google develop better native alarm clocks for phones/smart watches.
Having a plan
There’s no point in getting up early unless you have a plan for what you actually want to do with the extra time. Maybe you’re going to be heading out to work and would like to follow an unhurried routine or maybe you want to create time to focus on a hobby while the house is quiet. Have a plan and write it down. Use a brightly coloured sticky note and stick it on whatever your alarm is or in a notebook on top of your phone. Having no reason to wake up early usually leads to not waking up early.
Coffee shop of the week
Missing Bean, Abingdon
A venture outside of London to visit a friend in Abingdon near Oxford led us to Missing Bean - a small independent chain of coffee shops dotted around Oxfordshire. They have grown from an original standalone coffee shop opened in 2009 into a fully fledged coffee roaster and five separate shops.
Things I like about Missing Bean:
a sizeable selection of single origin coffees available to buy in the shop
aesthetically pleasing coffee bags and a good range of merch (see below)
the spread of locations, from their Oxford city centre outlets, to their shops in the suburbs like the one we visited in Abingdon (a town of ~40,000 people), and nearby Botley (a village of ~7,000 people). Missing Bean are doing a public service taking good coffee out of cities to places of all sizes.
Like Saint Frank, featured in the last edition, Missing Bean are also committed to using direct trade coffee beans, removing intermediaries from the procurement process resulting in a higher rate being paid to the coffee producers they work with around the world.
That’s all for The Mosaic this week. Have a good day and a good week and feel free to share this post if you liked it.