Lately I've been waking up at 5:30 am. I really love the practice of waking up early. But it's a difficult practice and it's taken me a long time to become consistent with it.

Here are some of my tips for successfully waking up early everyday:

  1. Go to bed early.
  2. Have something that must be addressed at the time you want to wake up.
  3. Practice everyday, without expectation and without disappointment.
  4. Just do it.

In my life a lot of the things I want to do are pretty difficult. This is just a fact of life and I've spent countless hours over the years trying to will my way passed the difficulty of waking early, or exercising regularly, or practicing the piano everyday, or programming when I really don't even want to look at a computer. But in recent months, especially since the pandemic hit, I've had time to slow down my racing thoughts and experiment with my routine and my practices. I've learned a few things that help me a lot and I'd like to archive/share them here.

To start here is a incomplete list of some of the things I have struggled to do regularly that I've been able to become more consistent with:

It's healthy to remember that you'll never be finished and that whatever it is you've made, formulated or otherwise created can always be improved (unless you've achieved some theoretical limit, in which case good job!). I'm sure I'll find more ways to fine tune my practice and build stronger systems over time. For now however I've got about 4 things that really help me in my various practices. I've written them above applied specifically to waking up early. But here I've generalized them to any practice:

  1. Practice a complementary discipline.
  2. Leverage your environment to encourage your practice
  3. Practice everyday, without expectation and without disappointment.
  4. Just do it.

It will be helpful for me to elaborate on them a little further.

Practice a complementary discipline

When you practice a discipline it's very helpful to have a secondary practice that compliments the primary one. A complimentary practice is one that, in the act of doing it the practitioner is actively encouraged, aided or otherwise assisted in practicing some other discipline. Examples of this:

Leverage your environment to encourage your practice

The goal here is basically to "Set yourself up for success". So for example preparing your clothes for morning exercise the night before, or setting your alarm clock/phone on the other side of the room from your bed so you have to get out of bed when it goes off, or establishing some obligation to perform your practice however small. All of these things are external forces that can help you perform a given practice. Continuing with my example of getting up early I have several environmental factors I use to help me keep up this practice:

  1. I keep my phone on the other side of the room from my bed.
    This has 2 effects:
    1. When I go to bed early, and especially when I'm not so tired, I can't endlessly scroll through noise online preventing my silly ape brain from derailing my practice.
    2. When the alarm rings at 5:30 am I have to stand up out of bed to turn it off (which I must do quickly lest I incure my wife's wrath)
  2. I have my alarm set to not allow snoozing.
    This means if I turn off the alarm I know there will be no second chance, and I must decide right then and there if I'm commited to getting up. Usually taking a leak gives me enough time to think it over and make the right choice.
  3. I have set parental controls on my phone to block major news sites and social media
    This is one is more just generally helpful to any practice since news and social media are major wastes of time. But it does prevent me from mindlessly bringing my phone to bed and getting sucked into syndicated garbage.

Be creative and think about what things in your environment inhibit a practice and think about how those things can be flipped or nullified to encourage the practice instead.

Practice everyday, without expectations and without disappointment

This is far and away the most important item on this list. And it takes some explaining. To introduce the idea is a quote from Novice to Master: An Ongoing Lesson in the Extent of My Own Stupidity by Soko Morinaga.

All people regardless of how their lives are structured hold themselves dear. Everyone wants to be happy. And Enlightenment is the starting point of happiness. We can use the words "true self-confidence" in place of "enlightenment." True self-confidence means confidence in the true self, and confidence in the true self is a necessary requisite to happiness.

The Power in which you can come to believe in yourself is not gained through training. It is the great power that transcends the self, that gives life to the self. The purpose of Zen practice is to awaken to the original power of which you have lost sight, not to gain some sort of new power. When you have sought and sought and finally exhausted all seeking, you become aware of that with which you have been, from the beginning - before ever beginning to search - abundantly blessed. After you have ceaselessly knocked and knocked, you realize, as I have said, that the door was standing wide open even before you ever started pounding away. That is what practice is all about.

Not only in places especially set up for training, but anytime and anywhere, the person who exerts himself or herself with dignity, without worrying about results and without giving in to disappointment, is a true practitioner, a true person of the Way. I believe that just this is the form of true human well-being

Essentially what this means is that the transformative power of practice comes from the act of consistently practicing. No matter the circumstances, so long as you keep going, keep practicing then you're doing right. An important part of consistently practicing regardless of conditions, is overcoming disappointment. If you allow yourself to become disappointed with the effect of your practice you will always quit, maybe not today but eventually it will defeat you. You must say "no" to disappointment and take pleasure in the grind. Similarly if you begin your practice with expectations of the result you will most often be let down and open the door for a tougher fight with disappointment. Moreover setting expectations on the practice places limits on your performance. If you enter into practice with some expectation as to how well you will do or how much you can take you'll likely stop when you reach that predetermined point, without knowing just how far you could have gone. You must begin with an empty mind and focus only on the act.

As an example:

As I stated at the beginning of this post I've begun many new practices in the last year. The biggest and most challenging has probably been fitness. I've had fitness practices in the past and always I end up stopping at some point for one reason or another. Previously when I trained I would do so with the expectation of being minimally capable, i.e. if last weak I ran an 8 minute mile then this week I should run at least an 8 minute mile if not faster. This small expectation I had placed on myself was good in one sense that it forced me to push myself, and I'm certain that was what I thought at the time. But it was ultimately detrimental to my practice for multiple reasons:

These and other factors stemming from my expectation of a minimum capability would always and invariably lead me to quit, not just once but everyday, until eventually I was no longer practicing at all.

Instead of expecting that I always beat or tie my previous best instead I should always just focus on going that mile, however slow. The focus should not be how well I practice but just the practice itself. This refocusing manifests itself as being present. When I'm out on my run or when I'm doing my strength routine my mind is wholly focused on each step, on each breath, on every muscle engaged in my current effort.
If you're running center your thoughts on our breath, on your posture, think with each step of all the muscles engaged in one single pursuit, to move your body through space.
If you're doing push ups or pull ups focus on the muscles engaged and the explosive breath and energy at the core of your being. Be right there focused and present just for that action.
Being unenlightened I cannot say for certain, but this must be something approximately similar to enlightenment.

Finally do your practice everyday, even if part of the practice is not practicing. This is important. A body cannot heal if it has no time to rest. Be mindful of your practice. If today you don't workout because it is a rest day then do so with intention. Say "Today I rest, and I must do so with dedication to my fitness". In this way you still practice fitness even though no exercise was performed.

Just do it

Nike slogans aside, this is a powerful statement with a lot of meaning behind it. As Ronnie Coleman said "Ain't nothin' to it but to do it.".

What this means is when you go to perform your practice just get on with it. At anytime in history man has had plenty to distract him, and myriad methods to procrastinate. Now especially we have even more distractions at our disposal. It's easy to get bogged down in data and over think the problem. If your goal is to get up early, stop weighing if you've had enough sleep or not and just get up, I promise you that before the day is over you'll know if you got enough sleep and you'll get a chance to change your sleep parameters again tonight. If you want to run, then stop thinking so hard about your heart rate, or your shoes or your attire and just go outside and run. Afterwards you'll have a much clearer picture of what worked well and what needs to change. This is applicable to basically everything you can possibly do, it's maybe a bit more nuanced and has some caveats if your goal is say "build a bridge" but there are ways to "just do it" there as well.

That's it

Ultimately the way you practice is down to you, and you should do what you think is best. The 4 methods listed above are the 4 major things I've learned and that I keep telling myself over and over again to help me practice all that I do with enthusiasm and with consistency. I hope this helps you in some way.

  1. Wikipedia: Sleep Cycles -- Length ↩