7 Benefits of Waking Up Early (That Have Nothing to Do With Being Rich and Famous)
By: Ayodeji Awosika
Tags: Life Lessons, Self Improvement, Productivity, Morning Routines, Psychology

You’ll Feel Like You’re Better Than Other People

Woah.

This wasn’t supposed to be one of those self-help articles that speak from a pedestal, so why is this my first point?

Confidence matters. Building skills and habits that make you feel better about yourself makes your life better in general. On top of that, human beings are wired to compare themselves to others.

So, instead of pretending like we don’t and stay stuck in negative cycles of comparison, why not find ways to feel like you’re better — not intrinsically, but behaviorally — than other people.

When you’re up at the ass crack of dawn working on your side business, exercising, or planning your day, you feel like you have a head start on the rest of the world.

Once the normal time people wake up rolls around, you feel like you’re on pace to get much more done than the average person. And it feels great.

You’ll Stop Doing This So Much

Do you ever find yourself up late at night?

Are you not getting enough sleep?

One of the biggest benefits of waking up early is the ability to go to sleep early.

If you wake up at 5 a.m. and you’re productive throughout the day, you’ll be more tired by the end of the night, making it easier to sleep. This creates a better sleep cycle. And sleep is important for your health.

Maybe you never get totally used to waking up early, but you’ll experience an overall better sleep cycle because you’re actually ready to go to bed at night.

Compare this with waking up later in the day and consuming caffeine later in the day which keeps you up longer — creating a vicious cycle where you’re stimulated yet fatigued and always feeling like you never have enough rest.

You’ll Appreciate This Much More

Do you have kids?

I have one. A 5-year-old. I love her to death, but let’s just say meditating in silence isn’t one of her favorite activities. When she wakes up, all hell breaks loose. My day has officially started and I can look forward to a ton of noise, distraction, and chaos throughout it.

Waking up early was critical in my 9 to 5 days because I had to deal with the time constraints of my job and the constraints of my child being awake and needing my attention. Combined, dealing with both is stressful. Simply having some moments to myself helped alleviate stress and anxiety.

Part of the routine involves 20 minutes of meditation. I’m not going to write a long treatise about the benefits of meditation. But for me, having just 20 minutes per day where I don’t feel like the world is spinning at ten million hours per hour makes a huge impact on my sanity.

If you’re an adult with kids, especially young ones, you live in the eye of a hurricane. Pile on your job, errands, and the other minutiae you have to deal with, and it’s enough to drive you nuts.

You don’t have to develop a meditation practice, but you can at least get to enjoy a little time with yourself. A little silence. Trust me, you probably need it.

You’ll Have a Better Chance of Accomplishing This

If you’re like 70 percent of Americans, you don’t exactly love your job.

Maybe you want to switch careers. Maybe you want to start a side business or even just a hobby that helps you exercise your creativity.

I don’t know about you, but waking up early to do that kind of work seems easier than trying to do it after work. If you’re a night owl and that routine works, good for you, don’t change.

But if you feel totally wiped out by the time you’re done with your job, getting dinner together, handling the kids, etc, a morning routine might be the only way to escape the rat race.

I never wanted to start a morning routine. In fact, I never got to the point where I loved waking up early. But I did want to get rid of my soul-sucking job and that was enough motivation for me.

You’ll Realize This

A funny thing happened to me when I started waking up early on a regular basis. I noticed how much time there is in a single 24 hour period.

It’s easy to let time slip by and, over a lifetime, you can squander the one commodity that means the most to you.

After squeezing out extra time in my day by getting up earlier, I started noticing other little cracks and crevasses to fit productive time into.

Circling back to the initial point of feeling like you’re ahead of the curve when you wake up early, that sense of pride will inspire you to find even more pockets of time to keep doing activities to increase your chances of reaching your goals.

Your morning routine becomes a keystone habit that reinforces other positive habits. The cycle keeps going up. Every action you take serves as a feedback loop for further action. Imagine starting your day in a way that positively reinforces the rest of your day.

You’ll Hardly Ever Feel Like This

I hate it when I feel like I’ve wasted a day.

If you’re lacking motivation, you might not be at this point yet, but when you start doing more work toward your dreams, you may develop a tendency to beat yourself up if you feel like you squandered a day.

When I honor my morning routine, I can always tell myself that I spent at least an hour working on my dream. That’s reassuring and motivates me to wake up and do it all over again.

You don’t have to carve out an hour + each day like I do. Your morning routine can be 10 minutes. Even that small amount of time can help you feel better about the way you spend your time.

This is because subconsciously, your brain only cares about momentum, not the magnitude of the tasks you’re doing, e.g., six straight days of a solid 10-minute routine benefits you more than a single hour-long session followed by five days where you do nothing.

You’ll Start to Feel This Way (And You’ll Never Want to Go Back)

Some people will tell you that starting a successful morning routine will part the heavens.

You’ll feel amazed and on top of the world every single day.

Nah, probably not.

But you’ll get used to it.

If you can simply get used to waking up early — not even love it — you’ll be well on your way to achieving whatever long-term goal your mornings serve.

You’ll get to reap the benefits of waking up early over and over again and it will become a habit, meaning you won’t have to do it as begrudgingly as you did when you started.

You can extend this way of thinking to a ton of positive habits like diet, exercise, saving money, and more. Over time, you start to develop an identity of someone who follows through with a habit, making it easier and easier to maintain over time.

The Bottom Line

You don’t have to do anything. Sleep in for the rest of your life if you want. I don’t care.

But if you are looking for a habit that can become a game-changer for you, waking up early is definitely one of those habits.

You have a short life and time is ticking.

Might as well get the most out of each and every day, right?