# How I became a person who wakes up early

This is an extended anecdotal description of a life change that honestly still surprises me; I went from the classic internet nerd who stays up until 3 and sleeps until noon, to a person who reliably goes to bed before 10pm and wakes up at 6:30am every morning. This didn't happen overnight (pun intended); it happened slowly, increasingly earlier and with increasing reliability, over the last \*checks notes\* ten years (although most of the shift is in the last four years).

This is not intended as a how-to guide for others, and probably won't help anyone with serious sleep issues.

I don't have a particular stance on whether waking up early is objectively good. But I've always had a personal aesthetic appreciation of it, and I'm not entirely sure why. I like the idea of being awake for more of the sunlight hours in the day, and especially of waking up just before the sun rises. I also like the idea of being so thrilled to be alive that you want to just cast the blankets off you and jump out of bed as soon as you realize you're awake. Which is the extreme opposite of how I would previously feel upon being woken up by my alarm.

### Aging

It's entirely possible that the entire explanation here is "your natural circadian rhythm shifted as you got older" (e.g. ~20 to ~30 years old). That certainly happened to some extent, especially in the earlier phase. But I also notice that every night, I *do* want to stay up and keep doing what I'm doing. I'm pretty sure I could, because I never really feel super tired. And if I'm socializing, it is trivially easy to stay up, and I have to use executive function override to go to bed.

### A regular social commitment

The chronologically first and possibly most significant structural change was scheduling with friends to regularly go to the climbing gym twice a week. I had gone with them a few times on weekends, and it didn't take me long to discover that I absolutely loved climbing. They then invited me to their preexisting regular climbing sessions in the mornings before work.

Climbing nights and evenings is obviously more convenient, but it also means that the gym is really full. I never liked climbing when it was busy, because there's a much higher risk of people running into each other on the wall; I could never really relax. You also have to sometimes wait for your turn. In the morning it's practically empty, so you can climb unrestricted.

She typically had to be at work by 9:30 or so, so we would usually be on our way to the gym by 8:15. Getting up early was hard for me, and I didn't like being the person who stumbles bleary-eyed into stand-up. I knew that having a super fun and socially reinforced activity would really motivate me to get up on time, so I was down.

### Incentive to always get enough sleep

As a software developer, I had also learned that losing sleep meant not working the next day. This is somewhat particular to me, but if I get less than 7 solid hours of sleep, I basically cannot focus on software work. I'm so slow that I might as well not be there. This is, of course, not particularly acceptable at a high-paying office job, so it didn't take many sleepy days before I was pretty strongly motivated to make sure that I always went to bed on time.

Given that I was waking up early to go climbing on some days, and that it was extremely important to always get enough sleep, the easiest thing to do was to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day.

### Even more regular social commitment

Later, someone I was dating moved into my group house, and we started spending daily time together. We agreed to schedule a night-time hang out, such that they were effectively putting me to bed by chatting to me for half an hour. This really helped to establish a regular habit. We still do this every night that we're both home.

### Melatonin

On top of all that, I discovered using melatonin as a casual sleep regulator. I had previous tried it and basically hated it. It would 1) not help me to go to sleep 2) give me trippy strong dreams, and 3) make it harder to wake up in the morning because I feel super groggy.

But later I learned that that had happened because I was taking it ~45 minutes or less before I wanted to be asleep. I later read [Scott's post](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/), and then tried taking it a few hours before I wanted to be asleep. It then had none of the three bad effects above! As time went on, this useful interval seemed to shrink, such that I now take it 1.5-2 hours before I want to be asleep. But it has never since had the three bad effects. I don't take it every day; I only take it occasionally if I want to extra-ensure that I get lots of sleep, or if I'm switching time zones.

### Maintain control through time changes

On that note, another thing I did was to deliberately *not* thrash my circadian rhythm during travel or daylight savings time changes. When I took a trip to Paris (8 hours offset from me) I spent over a week slowly shifting my circadian rhythm to match the time in Paris when I got off the plane. This was a bit silly, and not something I could have done with a regular job at the time, but it shows the kind of stance I was taking toward my sleep.

More recently, when daylight savings time changed, I didn't change my absolute wake-time. This meant that instead of waking up at 7:30, I was waking up at 6:30. When it switches back, I will probably continue to ignore it and then be waking up at 7:30.

### Focusmate

The most recent trick I've used is [Focusmate](https://www.focusmate.com/) to do one [pomodoro](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AksEurnb73RCg9Dse/one-year-of-pomodoros-1) in the morning at 7am. Even though I always wake up from my alarm and stay conscious, it's pretty easy for me to spend an entire hour laying in bed on my phone. I haven't quite gotten myself to be able to consistently leave my phone outside my room while sleeping, so instead, I've been scheduling a single Focusmate session at 7, which gives me plenty of time to get dressed and brush my teeth.

### Conclusion

This was never really a strategic, high-level master plan. It was just an incentive gradient of me paying attention to what was useful and what I wanted, and making systemic adjustments as my life went along. I also notice that it corresponds to the period of my life where I sort of gave up on trying to do self-improvement by introspective/psychological techniques, and instead tried to push on the systems/empirical/outside view side.