The Productive Freelancer has a Miracle Morning Routine (and Gets Up at 5am Most Mornings) — Part 2
I recently finished re-reading The Miracle Morning (something Hal Elrod, the author, encourages you to do with any books that you really connect with). It’s a particularly remarkable accomplishment for me because I just don’t re-read books. Like ever.
I talked in depth about my miracle morning routine in Part 1 of this series, but today I wanted to talk about one of the not-obligatory-but-certainly-core tenets of The Miracle Morning — regularly getting up earlier in the morning than you typically would so that you actually have the time to focus on your self-development.
I really do get up at 5am most mornings
I do not now, nor have I ever, considered myself to be a morning person.
My natural biorhythms, as long as I can remember, have always leaned hard toward night owl.
If I didn’t have to wake up at a certain time to ensure that my kiddo got fed and made it to school, I could easily stay up until midnight or 1am — even at the ripe old age of 47 (although to be honest, I haven’t tested this theory out for a good long while, but I’m still pretty certain I could do it).
So trust me when I say that 5am doesn’t come naturally to me.
Which most definitely makes this one of those instances where ‘if I can do it, you can do it, too.’
My alarm goes off at 5:02am
And I have until 6:22 to get through the bulk of my miracle morning before a groggy pre-teen makes her way downstairs to get ready for school.
Side-note: Why not have my alarms set for 5:00am and 6:30am (instead of 5:02 and 6:22)? This comes from my long-time friend Tom. We used to work together back in my corporate days (I miss seeing my friend Tom all the time), and he would schedule meetings to start at odd times on the premise that if someone had to be somewhere at an unusual time, they were more likely to try and be punctual than if the meeting started at a nice round number like on the hour of half hour. I don’t know really why it works for me with my morning alarm, but it absolutely does. Plus something about that exactness means I’m squeezing out every inch of sleep that I can.
Back before I started doing a miracle morning routine, I would wake up around 8 or 9am. So how did I manage to walk my wake-time back almost 3 hours, you might wonder?
Here are Hal’s tips and tactics for waking up earlier in the morning (or at least my take on them):
Set your intention the night before.
Tell yourself that, regardless of what time you actually fall asleep, you’re going to wake up well rested.
You know that thing you do when you’re either late getting to bed or having troubles falling asleep so you start calculating in your head how many hours of actual sleep you’re going to get if you fall asleep right this second and you’re already planning to be exhausted in the morning and having to drag your tired butt out of bed when the alarm goes off?
Well, just don’t.
Instead of telling yourself all the possible negative stuff that could happen, start telling yourself all the possible positive stuff that could happen. Think about how you might wake up right at the end of sleep cycle, even if it’s only been like 5 or 6 total hours of sleep, and you’re wide awake and ready to go. Think about the really interesting book you’re in the middle of reading and how you can’t wait to learn what’s coming next. Think about how good a brisk, sunrise walk feels.
This sounds hokey, but it really does work.The things you tell yourself matter.
And then he suggests some tactics for physically bringing your body to life quicker and more consistently in the morning:
- Move your alarm clock to the other side of your room so that you have to physically get out of bed to turn it off in the morning. (I don’t do this one.)
- Brush your teeth. (I absolutely do do this one.)
- Drink a full glass of water. Hydration is important to getting your body to be firing on all cylinders.
- Then either get dressed or jump in the shower. I put on my workout clothes that I’ve left sitting out in my bathroom the night before so I’m ready for the exercise part of my miracle morning routine later in the morning.
Here’s what I actually do to wake up:
Get plenty of sleep.
It’s easy to say ‘go to bed earlier’, but if you start out as a night owl, that’s not all that easy to do. Nothing is worse than trying to get to bed early and then just laying there in the dark, wide awake, wishing you could freakin’ fall asleep already.
But once you start waking up at 5am, and once you’ve been doing it for a short while, your body pretty quickly adjusts and you find yourself getting really tired at like 8 or 9 at night. My husband and I usually meander upstairs around 9ish, and I try to be lights-out by 10pm at the latest.
Pay attention to how many hours you sleep when you don’t have to wake up to an alarm. I hover somewhere between needing 7 and 8 hours (there have been periods in my life when it’s been as much as 9 hours for me). So lights out at 10 and waking up at 5 usually gives me what I need.
Have a routine for falling asleep.
Part of my evening routine, as I wind down for bed, involves reading. This is when I read my for-fun-not-self-development book (which is awesome except when the book is a little too good and I end up staying up late to keep reading).
But the point is, I have a series of “tasks” that I do every night to prime myself for sleep — I floss and brush my teeth, I change into pj’s, I stretch a little bit, I put on some calming music (from the Calm app), I read for like 15–20 minutes, and then I go lights out. (And then I kick my husband so he’ll roll onto his side because he inevitably starts snoring within minutes of me turning the lights out.)
The routine and consistency are the keys to signaling to your body and brain to slow down and prepare for rest.
Get good sleep.
Things I do to ensure that I get good quality sleep (because once you become a mom, for some reason the tiniest things can trigger you to wake up, so I work hard to stack the deck in my favor on this one):
- We keep our house cooler at night. I set the thermostat to drop the temp from daytime about 2 degrees.
- I’m careful about my caffeine intake during the day and try not to drink anything with caffeine after like noon or 1 in the afternoon so it doesn’t keep me awake at night. (Noon seems ridiculously early for this — a full 10 hours before I go to bed — but I’ve tested it, and this is my cutoff time. Yours might be different.)
- Consistent exercise makes a huge difference. If I take a few days off of walking, I notice it showing up in poor-quality sleep.
- I try not to drink too much water within a few hours before bed so that I’m not up and down going to the bathroom all night long.
- Our bedroom is really dark and quiet and we don’t have a TV in there.
I stopped using the snooze button ages ago.
(And I don’t let my daughter use hers either.)
I think the snooze button really sets you up for failure first thing in the morning — talk about the ultimate procrastination. And if you don’t have the safety net of knowing your alarm is going to go off again, then it’s a lot easier to make yourself get up and get out of bed.
Have a routine for waking up.
When my alarm goes off, I start stretching and wiggling my hands and legs and feet to get some blood flowing before I even sit up.
I throw the covers off so that there’s a significant change in temperature.
If my husband is also waking up at the same time or is already up, I immediately turn on my light.
Otherwise, I stumble to the bathroom and turn on the very bright lights in there.
Then I proceed to brush my teeth, wash my face, brush my hair, and get dressed.
By that time, I’m usually fairly alert, so I make my way downstairs, fill my water bottle, pet my cat, and sit down to start my miracle morning routine.
Here’s the kind of weird, counterintuitive part about my approach to waking up at 5am…
I’m not even sure it will make logical sense to anyone reading this, but my point in sharing it is to encourage you to think about what you really want and what actually works for you (while being nice to yourself in the process rather than a strict disciplinarian). Then come up with your own creative solutions and supports to help you achieve that goal.
I like the sound of a Tibetan singing bowl. It’s soothing — soothing enough to be played in the middle of a meditation and not shock you off your pillow (I don’t actually use a pillow when I meditate — I just sit in a plain old chair or on the sofa where I work.)
So I found a Tibetan singing bowl sound and set that as my 5:02am alarm. (I use my phone for my alarms because I can set multiple alarms on it easier with different tones and I don’t have to remember to turn it on and off every day.)
Here’s the kicker — I turn the volume down on my alarm as low as it can go, so that if I don’t hear it go off right away because I’m in really deep sleep, it doesn’t wake me up immediately.
Note: This is not a reliable method for making sure you wake up at a very specific time. This is a good method if you’ve got flexibility around precisely when you get out of bed and want to make getting up at 5am a pleasant experience for yourself.
But my Tibetan singing bowl alarm keeps ringing (the bell gongs and then gradually fades out over about 20 seconds and then gongs again) until I wake up and turn it off.
Probably 90% of the time, I hear it the very instant it goes off. But even if I don’t, I do reliably wake up within about 10 minutes of it. This morning, for instance, I didn’t hear it until 5:08am because I was in the middle of a (really weird) dream.
Point being, I refuse to be jarred out of bed by some obnoxious blaring sound. That’s a terrible way to start my day.
And then my dirty little secret that I don’t even feel bad about.
I nap when I need to. And it’s glorious and I don’t feel bad or guilty about it at all!!
Lots of days, I don’t need a nap.
Some days, I need just 15–20 minutes. Some days, I need an hour and a half.
If I’m tired mid-day, I lose a lot more time trying to force stay myself to stay awake by doing things that typically end up being a complete waste of time — “work” often devolves into rabbit-hole excursions on the internet — than if I just go horizontal for a short period and let my body actually rest.
I’m not saying you should use all or even any of these strategies and tactics.
The idea is to find things — and it will likely need to be multiple strategies and tactics, not just one — that actually work for you. Then implement them consistently so that you’re priming your brain and body to wake up by the actions you take first thing when you get out of bed.
Don’t take some random-person-on-the-internet’s advice as gospel and try to implement the things they (I) do and recommend. Read lots of different ideas and viewpoints and perspectives and pull out the gems that intrigue you and give them a try.
Next time, I’ll share what I loved and didn’t love about The Miracle Morning. Stay tuned because as much as of an impact as this book has had on me, there are a lot of things about it that I didn’t find all that endearing, and I want to share both sides of that story.
