Here are five solutions that will help you to stop waking up and feeling tired every morning and instead, wake up full of energy.
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Key Takeaways
How often do you actually wake up feeling energized? How many times a week do you get up when your alarm rings, without hitting the snooze button? Nothing is worse than going to bed early, only to wake up still feeling exhausted.
There are number of factors that affect how tired you feel in the morning, and you probably have some habits that are robbing you of your energy. Here are some of the solutions that you should adopt, which will help you wake up early and well rested.
5 Ways to Wake Up Fresh Every Morning
1. Stop Snoozing
When you snooze, you’re not really getting more sleep. It doesn’t make you feel better about waking up. It actually does nothing beneficial for you. Every single time you hit the snooze button you wake up feeling more tired.
This is because our sleep consists of 90 minute cycles. When you fall back asleep for such a short amount of time, your alarm wakes you up in the middle of your sleep phase, which will leave you feeling even more tired and sluggish.
- Use an app called “Sleep Cycle”. What this app does, is it wakes you up at the end of your sleep phase. It does it by tracking your movements during the night and the alarm only goes off, when it detects you’re at the end of the cycle. Waking up this way will leave you much more energetic than waking up in the middle of your REM phase.
2. Get Enough Sleep
We need a certain amount of sleep every day for our body to function properly. This may sound stupid and you probably already know this, but we tend to regularly sleep either too much or too little.
One of the reasons this happens, is because we go to sleep at inconsistent hours. One day we go to bed at 10pm, the next at 3am. But you should go to sleep and wake up at the same time seven days per week. This way your body gets into the rhythm and you can wake up naturally at the end of a sleep cycle, every single day.
Everyone has a different amount of sleep needed to feel energized.
- If you want to find how many hours you personally need to wake up refreshed, go to bed at the same time every night for a week.
- Wake up without an alarm and write down the number of hours you slept every night.
- At the end of the week, you should be able to see how many hours you need to wake up and have a great day.
- You can then use this information to know when you should go to bed, to wake up at the required time.
3. Rehydrate
It’s crucial that you hydrate yourself first thing in the morning. After 6 to 8 hours without water, you’ll naturally be dehydrated, and dehydration causes fatigue.
Every single day before going to sleep, place a glass of water nearby. That way when you wake up, the water is already waiting for you. The objective is to rehydrate your body and mind as fast as possible, to replace the water you were deprived of during the hours you slept.
Often when people feel tired, whether in the morning or afternoon, what they really need is more water, not more coffee.
4. Get the Blood Flowing
Another important thing to do, is some light exercise as soon as you wake up. Any physical activity that gets the heart rate up and the blood flowing is going to raise your energy levels.
It may seem counter intuitive, but researchers say expending energy by engaging in regular exercise, doesn’t make you tired, it actually creates energy in your body. Even if you think you’re too tired to do anything, get up and walk around the room, and in a couple of minutes you’ll feel some energy that wasn’t there before.
- The exercise doesn’t need to be anything extreme. No need to go run a marathon before breakfast.
- Just do some stretching, and get the body moving.
5. Avoid Screens Before Bed
Your TV, smart phone and computer screen all produce artificial blue light. The problem with artificial light in the evening, is that it tricks your body in to thinking that it’s actually day time.
When it gets darker outside, your body naturally produces a sleep hormone called melatonin. Since artificial light blocks melatonin production, we can really screw up our sleep, because your body doesn’t send signals to your cells that’s it’s night time. That’s why you shouldn’t be looking at any screen at least 2 hours before bed.
For those of you who absolutely can’t do without your phone or computer before bed, there is a solution for this blue light problem.
- There are two apps that you should install on your phone and computer, called Twilight and F.lux. What they do is, they block most of the artificial blue light by making your screen more orange. And the best part is, both are free.
However if you’re serious about fixing your tiredness problem, you won’t be using any screens before bed anyway.