Mornings are extremely important to your overall health and the quality of your sleep. Common morning habits can make or break your sleep-wake cycle.
Here at Rested Health, we want to teach you the habits that have the least effort with the most reward. So, without further ado, here is one of the most important changes you can make to boost your mornings AND improve your sleep.
GET OUT OF BED AS SOON AS YOU WAKE UP
Action Plan
The Problem:
Laying in bed creates unhelpful associations that disrupt your sleep system, zaps your energy, and makes it harder to sleep at night.
How to do it
The Science
As tempting as it is to catch just a few more minutes of sleep, avoiding the temptation to hit the snooze button is one of the most important parts of your morning ritual.
When your alarm goes off in the morning, you are usually nearing the end of your final REM cycle. If you get up right away, your brain understands the cues and begins pumping you with “wake-up” hormones.If you hit snooze, you end up slipping back into REM. That second alarm sounds and wakes you up in the middle of a REM cycle, which can lead to sleep inertia.
Sleep inertia can cause grogginess, brain fog, and fatigue that can take hours to subside. Getting up right away also helps regulate your circadian rhythm. Your circadian rhythms run on internal clocks and operate best with a consistent schedule. Disruptions to your circadian rhythm from irregular sleep patterns impacts everything from hormone production to immune system and mood.
Finally, staying in bed too long in the mornings can lead to unhelpful associations between your bed and activating activities like scrolling your phone, watching Instagram reels, checking emails, or consuming the news. A 2011 study by Thomee et al. found that increased phone use negatively impacted all areas of sleep.
Pep Talk Moment
Change is hard, here’s the best advice we can give…
Aside from messing with sleep – blasting your brain with world news, Tik Tok drama, and work emails before you’ve even had your first thought is unfair to you and your mental health. Stick with this habit and you’ll be rewarded.
Health Benefits
- Boosts energy! (Seriously! It’s just rough for the first few days).
- Getting up right away anchors your circadian rhythm (that means better sleep tonight).
- Breaks unhealthy associations between your bed and non-sleep activities.
Tips
- Place your alarm in a place where you have to leave the bed to turn it off.
- The night before, choose an activity that you’ll look forward to in the morning.
- Blast the tunes. splash cold water on your face, and bask in some sunlight!
