WAKEY-WAKEY

We’re always hearing how early birds catch the worm, run the companies and ultimately rule the world. But what if you’re just not wired to rise and shine? Can you reset your body clock and change your life? I gave myself a week to try it and find out.

Can you become a morning person?

Let’s just get one thing clear, right off the bat. I am not a morning person. (Now there’s an understatement. I can just imagine my brother snickering at the very idea.) If I were to be completely honest, I’m writing this very sentence in bed, on my phone, in the dark because my laptop is in another room and I can’t face getting up.

According to Hal Elrod, author of international bestseller The

Miracle Morning (which I’m reading only for the purpose of writing this article; the title would usually put me right off), your mornings set the tone for the day, and on a grander scale, your entire life. No pressure, hey, Hal. (I already don’t like where this is going.)

‘How you wake up each day and your morning routine (or lack thereof) dramatically affects your levels of success in every single area of your life,’ he writes. ‘Focused, productive, successful mornings generate focused, productive, successful days – which inevitably create a successful life.’

If that is true, I am well and truly screwed.

Usually I get up at around 7am, after three or four alarms set 10 minutes apart. That’s on a good day. I’ve also been known to snooze through them all and wake up at eight in a blind panic. And the people closest to me know not to be all chipper and springy in my presence first thing in the AM. My varsity roommate and I used to wordlessly pass each other in the hallway in the mornings; conversations happened only after 10am. I miss her. My husband insists on talking to me in the mornings.

I’ve always been fascinated by morning people – in much the same way that I’m fascinated by documentaries on the crime channel about the guy who chopped up his neighbour and stored the bits in the freezer. The chopping-up-humans compulsion seems pretty much on par with the instinct that drives otherwise seemingly normal people to get up at 5am and go for a run on a dark, freezing cold winter morning. Someone should really do a study to see if there’s a correlation.

So why did I sign up for a week of early wake-ups? Well, why does anyone do anything, really? I thought it would be a fun experiment.

‘The people closest to me know not to be all chipper and springy in my presence first thing in the AM.’

DAY 1

My alarm goes off at 6am – best to ease into it, no? – and my first thought is NOPE. Not today. Not gonna happen! I got to bed late. I’m not ready. It’s pitch dark and rainy outside. And my husband, the early riser, the morning person, the one who usually leaps out of bed at the crack of dawn, has traitorously decided to sleep in this morning and is snoozing away peacefully next to me. Conditions are clearly not optimal. Best to try again tomorrow. DAY 2 At 5am, the husband (now back to his usual day-breaker routine) wakes me.

‘I thought you were getting up early today?’ (He’s very excited by the idea that I might be miraculously converted into a morning person.) ‘Only at six,’ I mumble and go back to sleep. I want it to be doable, so I set the bar relatively low: my plan is to wake up at six and read The Miracle

Morning in bed for an hour. I set four alarms (at 5:30, 5:40, 5:50 and 6am) so I can snooze a calculated three times before actually getting up, as per my usual routine. At 6am, I switch on my light and settle in to read, quite proud of myself for sticking to the programme. Boy, did I get it wrong – there’s a whole section in the book on why you should never use the snooze button. Whoops. You’re also not supposed to stay in bed.

‘[We] mistakenly assume that each choice we make, and each individual action we take, is affecting only that particular moment or circumstance,’ writes Hal. ‘For example, you may think that it’s no big deal to miss a workout, procrastinate on a project or eat fast food because you get a do-over tomorrow… Nothing could be further from the truth.’ Yikes. Hal was lobbing some major bombshells at me here.

‘Every time you do the easy thing, instead of the right thing, you’re shaping your identity, becoming the type of person who does what’s easy rather than what’s

right.’ My snooze-button routine, says Hal, was stopping me from developing discipline and, according to his good friend (are these his only credentials?) Peter Voogd, ‘discipline creates lifestyle’. By hitting the snooze button, we’re ‘programming our subconscious mind with the instructions that it is okay for us not to follow through with the things we intended to do’.

A few pages on, he takes it a step further: ‘When you delay waking up until you have to – you wait until the last possible moment to get out of bed and start your day – consider that what you’re actually doing is resisting your life.’ The take-home message: you snooze, you lose. My cop-out/compromise routine just wasn’t going to cut it.

DAY 3

I set my alarm for 5:30am, and this time I’m prepared: I plan to follow Hal’s ‘five-step snooze-proof wake-up strategy’. STEP 1: ‘Set your intentions before bed.’ (More on the bedtime affirmation tomorrow.) The key, says Hal, is to ‘consciously decide every night to actively and mindfully create a positive expectation for the next morning’. Got it. Thinking positive thoughts. I can do this. STEP 2: An oldie but effective nonetheless: move your alarm clock out of reach – so far out of reach you have to get out of bed to turn it off. ‘Motion creates energy, so when you get up and out of bed it naturally helps you wake up.’ STEP 3: Brush your teeth and splash some water on your face. This is about filling the first few minutes of the day with mindless activities while your body is still waking up.

STEP 4: Drink a full glass of water. ‘After six to eight hours without water, you’ll naturally be mildly dehydrated, and dehydration causes fatigue,’ writes Hal. ‘Often when people feel tired – at any time of the day – what they really need is more water, not more sleep.’

STEP 5: Get dressed in your workout gear. You should ‘earn’ your morning shower, says Hal. So did it work? I hate to say it, but it did. Not that I went for a 5km run or anything that drastic; I rolled out my yoga mat in the lounge and let a spandex-clad girl on YouTube talk me into doing some low-key stretches. It was a really nice way to start the day.

And I had so much time to get ready for work that I managed to fit in a lot of things I usually don’t have time for, like making the bed, applying a face mask, boiling some eggs for lunch – my efforts were slightly thwarted by the fact that I then left them at home, but nevertheless – and cleaning out some old till slips and crumpled tissues from my handbag.

DAY 4

On Day 3 we went out for dinner with friends, but even though I steered clear of the wine and we called it a night at a relatively reasonable hour, I only got to bed well after midnight.

Sadly, the fear of being groggy and tired all day was not going to let me off the hook with Hal.

‘How we feel when we wake up in the morning – and this is a very important distinction – is not solely based on how many hours of sleep we got, but significantly impacted by how we told ourselves we were going to feel when we woke up,’ he writes. So if you think, ‘Oh no, I’m going to get only four hours of sleep tonight; I’m going to be exhausted tomorrow,’ it is a ‘self-fulfilling, self-sabotaging prophecy’.

Hal recommends a bedtime affirmation during which you tell yourself that x hours of sleep is exactly enough, and that you’re thankful to wake up energised and rested. (Download it for free at www.miraclemorning.com/starthere/) Clearly I didn’t find myself convincing enough – by 3pm that afternoon, I was flagging.

DAY 5

Just when you think you’re making progress… I’m swiftly coming to the conclusion that winter is a terrible time to try to change the inner workings of your body clock, and expecting to wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed is unreasonable unless you went to bed early – as in 8pm early.

Anyway, I push through, because today is about S.A.V.E.R.S. – Hal’s acronym for the six transformative habits that you need to cultivate to change your outlook on life. (S, sadly does not stand for sleep.)

S IS FOR SILENCE

In our ‘noisy, fast-paced and overstimulated’ lives, taking some time to just sit quietly can work wonders.

‘If you want to immediately

reduce your stress levels, to begin each day with the kind of calm, clarity and peace of mind that will allow you to stay focused on what’s most important in life,’ says Hal, ‘do the opposite of what most people do – start every morning with a period of purposeful silence.’

My mornings are usually rushed and frenetic; I can definitely do with 10 minutes of quiet time. The idea is that you meditate or pray, breathe deeply and reflect. Sadly, I’m not allowed to stay in bed even for this – it’s much too easy to go from sitting to slouching to sleeping if you’re still in bed, says Hal. (The man has a point.)

A IS FOR AFFIRMATIONS

(You must have seen that one coming.) ‘Whether or not you realise it, incessantly talking to one’s self is not just for crazy people. Every single one of us has an internal dialogue that runs through our heads, almost non-stop.’ So you’re chattering away to yourself all day – but how much of what you say is positive and life-affirming? Probably not very much, says Hal. He recently came across an alarming statistic: ‘80% of women have self-deprecating thoughts about themselves (body image, job performance, other people’s opinion of them, etc.) throughout the day.’ Eighty percent!

Henry Ford said it best: ‘Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right either way.’ So for 10 minutes, tell yourself supportive things – download some mantras off the Morning Miracle site or come up with your own. Think about what you want to change in your life, why you want those things and what you plan to do to attain those goals.

V IS FOR VISUALISATION

This one follows on from the affirmations – now you need to sit and imagine yourself doing all those things. Hal recommends visualising who you need to be and what you need to do to succeed.

‘When you visualise daily, you align your thoughts and feelings with your vision… Visualisation can be a powerful aid to overcome self-limiting habits such as procrastination and to take the actions necessary to achieve your goals.’

E IS FOR EXERCISE

Of course, we all know by now that exercise is good for you. It reduces stress, boosts energy, gives you confidence and is the single best thing you can do for your overall health. Need more motivation? Self-made multimillionaire entrepreneur Eben Pagan says that the number one key to success is to ‘start every morning off with a personal success ritual’. He recommends a short burst of exercise. You can do whatever you want, even if it’s just 10 minutes of jumping jacks, a few yoga poses or a bout of skipping.

R IS FOR READING

Hal recommends reading a book that aids your personal development – whatever that may be – and aiming for 10 pages a day. Somehow I don’t think the thriller on my bedside table is what he has in mind. Then again, I’m also reading his book – that counts, surely?

S IS FOR SCRIBING

Journalling, basically. Whether you feel like you have a novel locked away inside you (most people do, apparently) or you just want to document some thoughts, feelings and insights, putting them into writing is an excellent way to start. This can help you gain clarity, capture ideas, review lessons and acknowledge your progress, says Hal. Finally, something I don’t have to work at: I already keep a notebook next to my bed, and I often find myself jotting down thoughts and ideas that come to me in the middle of the night.

DAY 6

You’d think that Saturdays are the hardest for getting up early, but I have an early horse riding class every Saturday, so I’m always up early. Somehow it’s easier when you know it’s at a set time – and you’ve already paid for it!

DAY 7

Sorry, Hal. Sundays are for sleeping in. And breakfast in bed. That’s non-negotiable.

Verdict

I knew this week was going to be hard. And although I didn’t do too badly, I still feel like I am just hardwired to hate mornings. Having said that, I really enjoyed having a bit more time to myself, and I might even stick with the early morning stretches. One week probably isn’t enough time to give it a fair go – maybe I should try for another? But only if I’m allowed to snooze.

‘When you delay waking up until you have to, consider that what you’re actually doing is resisting your life.’ – Hal Elrod