WHY DID YOU GET OUT OF BED THIS MORNING?
“You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction.”
—George Lorimer
“Your first ritual that you do during the day is the highest leveraged ritual, by far, because it has the effect of setting your mind, and setting the context, for the rest of your day.”
—Eben Pagan
Why did you bother getting out of bed this morning? Think about that for a second. Why do you wake up at the time you do, most mornings? Why do you leave the comfort of your warm, cozy bed? Is it because you want to? Or is it because you have to?
If you’re like most people, you wake up to the incessant beeping of an alarm clock each morning and reluctantly drag yourself out of bed because you have to be somewhere, do something, answer to or take care of someone else. We hit the snooze button and resist the inevitable act of waking up, unaware that our resistance is sending disempowering messages to our subconscious mind, such as “I don’t have enough discipline to get out of bed, let alone do what I need to do to change my life.”
If given the choice between staying in bed for as long as possible or getting out of bed to start the day in an optimal way (because it doesn’t usually feel like we have a choice), most people would rather stay in bed.
You Snooze, You Lose: The Truth About Waking Up
The old saying “you snooze, you lose” may have a deeper meaning than any of us realized. When we resist waking up and delay getting out of bed, we’re simultaneously resisting our opportunity to wake up and create the life we claim that we want. When we respond to the sound of the alarm clock with an internal dialogue along the lines of, “Oh no, it’s morning already. I have to wake up. I don’t want to wake up,” we’re also telling ourselves (and the universe, if you believe in that sort of thing), “I know I say that I want to improve myself and my life, but not as much as I want to lay here, unconscious, for a little bit longer.” Consider the kind of suboptimal mindset we are embodying when we begin our day with this resistance.
Repeatedly pressing the snooze button also has an unavoidable physiological impact. According to Robert S. Rosenberg, medical director of the Sleep Disorders Center of Prescott Valley in Flagstaff, Arizona, “When you hit the snooze button repeatedly, you’re doing two negative things to yourself. First, you’re fragmenting what little extra sleep you’re getting, so it is of poor quality. Second, you’re starting to put yourself through a new sleep cycle that you aren’t giving yourself enough time to finish. This can result in persistent grogginess throughout the day.”
Many people who struggle to get out of bed when the alarm sounds report that the morning is the most difficult time of day for them. They wake up feeling stressed about some aspect of their life or life in general, so they delay waking up and getting out of bed for as long as possible. For some people, it is because of a job they feel obligated to go to or due to a relationship that is failing. Some people feel this way due to chronic depression and its ability to weigh on a person’s mind, emotions, and heart without being able to name a specific reason.
Regardless of the cause, failing to start our morning with intention and purpose can have a detrimental impact on our mental health and emotional well-being. It becomes a vicious cycle: we wake up with despair, spend the day ruminating over stressful thoughts and emotions, lay down to bed feeling anxious or depressed, then repeat the cycle of melancholy the next day.
Conversely, when you have a morning personal development ritual in place, one that ensures you start each day with intention, purpose, and self-optimization, you interrupt the cycle. Instead of going to bed feeling stressed and worried about waking up to face your problems, you can now go to bed each night feeling hopeful and excited about starting your day with proven practices to improve your life. Having a morning ritual acts as a kind of buffer against dealing with life’s challenges. Rather than waking up and immediately feeling stressed and overwhelmed, you begin each day in an optimal mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual state, which will enable you to manage difficult circumstances, enjoy life, and achieve your goals more effectively.
How Much Sleep Do We Really Need?
In the first edition of The Miracle Morning, I failed to emphasize the importance of getting adequate sleep. I kind of glossed over it. But sleep is one of the most consequential tools for optimizing our mental, physical, and emotional health. We will delve much deeper into this topic in “Chapter 11: The Miracle Evening,” but I think it’s important to begin addressing it here.
When it comes to how many hours of sleep we need to perform at our best, sleep experts will tell you that there is no universal number that applies to everyone. National Sleep Foundation guidelines advise that healthy adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep per night. Babies, young children, and teens need even more sleep to enable their growth and development. People over 65 should also get seven to eight hours per night.
The optimal number for you is influenced by variables such as age, genetics, overall health, exercise (or lack thereof), diet, stress level, and evening rituals (including how close to bedtime you eat your last meal), just to name a few. While you may be at your absolute best sleeping six to seven hours, someone else may find that they function optimally on eight or nine hours.
Since age and genetics are out of our control, I find it much more useful to focus on the factors that we can control—namely diet, exercise, and our evening rituals. For example, if your diet consists of processed foods, preservatives, artificial flavors and dyes, pesticides, and excessive sugar and carbohydrates, then your body may require more sleep to deal with the detrimental effects of such foods and to eliminate any toxins that you’ve consumed. Similarly, if you eat too close to bedtime (within an hour or two), you are burdening the body with digesting your food while you’re trying to sleep instead of giving it uninterrupted time to purely rest and rejuvenate.
On the other hand, if you eat a diet primarily consisting of healthy, nutrient-dense whole foods—such as organic fruits, vegetables, and meats—and you finish your last meal a few hours before bedtime (giving your body time to properly digest your final meal of the day), then your body will be able to rest and rejuvenate much more easily. The person who eats a healthy diet will almost always have more energy and function more optimally, even with less sleep, than the person who eats poorly.
Since there is such a wide variety of opposing evidence from countless studies and experts, and since the amount of sleep needed varies from person to person, I’m not going to attempt to make a case that there is one right approach to sleep. Instead, I’ll share my own results, from personal experience and experimentation and from studying the sleep habits of some of the greatest minds in history. I’ll warn you: some of this may be somewhat controversial.
How to Wake Up Feeling More Energized
Through experimenting with various sleep durations, I discovered something quite unexpected: how we feel in the morning is largely affected by our own personal belief about the amount of sleep we need and how we’re going to feel in the morning. In other words—and this is an important distinction—how we feel when we wake up is based not only on how many hours of sleep we get, but also on how much sleep we believe we need and how we tell ourselves we’re going to feel in the morning.
For example, if you believe that you need eight hours of sleep to feel rested but you’re getting into bed at midnight and have to wake up at 6 AM, you’re likely to tell yourself, “I’m only getting six hours of sleep so I’m going to feel exhausted in the morning.” Then, what happens as soon as your alarm clock goes off and you realize it’s time to wake up? What’s the first thought that enters your consciousness? It’s typically the same thought that you had before bed: “Just as I thought; I only got six hours of sleep, and I feel exhausted.” It’s a self-fulfilling, self-sabotaging prophecy. If you tell yourself you’re going to feel tired in the morning, regardless of how many hours of sleep you get, then you are setting yourself up to feel tired. If you believe that you need eight hours to feel rested, then you’re not going to feel rested on anything less. But what if you changed your beliefs?
Developing a basic understanding of what’s often referred to as the mind-body connection (or what scientists call the “biopsychosocial paradigm”) has become increasingly useful as research continues to prove that our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and attitudes can positively or negatively affect our biological functioning. The brain and body are connected through neural pathways, and communication occurs via chemical and physical messengers, such as neurotransmitters and hormones. These messengers transmit signals between the body and the brain to control our everyday functions, from breathing, digestion, and pain sensations to heart rate, thinking, and emotions. This means that your thoughts and emotions are actually physical processes, and they have a meaningful effect on the systems in your body. However, you don’t need a scientific study to tell you that when you go to bed feeling stressed and overwhelmed, you typically wake up feeling stressed and overwhelmed.
Personally, I’ve had multiple firsthand experiences that have shown me the physiological power we wield when we consciously and intentionally use our mind-body connection. Remember that, after my car accident, doctors said I would never walk again. However, I chose to believe that I could. I meditated and visualized my body healing and saw myself walking. I affirmed, with unwavering faith and optimism, that I would walk again. And three weeks after my car accident, after breaking my leg and pelvis in multiple places, my doctors were baffled when a routine X-ray showed that my body had healed beyond what they believed to be possible. Later that day, I took my first step. That prompted me to begin studying the mind-body connection so I could better understand and apply it.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to interview famed cancer surgeon and bestselling author Dr. Bernie Siegel. He said that of the thousands of cancer patients he treated over his 40-plus-year career, the one thing that nearly all survivors had in common was their mindset and, specifically, their belief in their ability to heal. He said that he worked with many patients who, statistically, should not have survived, and the one thing they had in common was that they maintained an unwavering belief that they were going to survive, even though the odds were stacked against them. He said that he also saw countless patients—those with far less deadly cancers—give up the belief that they were going to heal and sadly not make it.
Based on scientific research, the countless experiences of other people, and my own experience, I reckon that if we can use our minds to defy the odds and overcome seemingly insurmountable physical ailments, then we can use that same mind to influence the quality of our sleep and how we feel in the morning. To test this theory, I have experimented with various sleep durations—from as little as four hours to as many as nine. The only other variable in my experimentation was the intention I set about how I was going to feel in the morning based on the number of hours I slept. First, I told myself, right before bed, that I was not getting enough sleep and that I was going to feel exhausted when I woke up in the morning. Entertaining this belief before bed became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
On four hours of sleep, I woke up feeling exhausted.
On five hours of sleep, I woke up feeling exhausted.
On six hours of sleep, you guessed it—I felt exhausted.
Seven hours, eight hours, nine hours—the hours of sleep I got didn’t significantly change how I felt when the alarm clock went off in the morning. As long as I told myself that I wasn’t getting enough sleep and that I was going to feel tired in the morning, that’s exactly how I felt.
Then, I conducted the same experiment with a different intention. I recited the following empowering bedtime affirmation to wake up feeling energized and excited in the morning, no matter how many hours of sleep I got:
I am grateful that I’m getting ___ hours of sleep tonight. My mind and body are capable of extraordinary things, the least of which is generating an abundance of energy from ___ hours of sleep. I know that my mindset influences my biology, so I choose to wake up tomorrow feeling energized and excited to do my Miracle Morning.
Whether I got nine, eight, seven, six, five, or as little four hours of sleep, as long as I consciously decided before bed that I was getting enough sleep and that I was going to wake up feeling energized, I consistently woke feeling better than I ever had before. However, don’t take my word for it. I encourage you to experiment with this yourself.
To be crystal clear, I am not suggesting that telling yourself you’re getting enough sleep trumps the importance of getting enough sleep. Adequate, consistent sleep is crucial to your brain’s and body’s ability to function optimally, and sleep deprivation can be devastating to your physical, mental, and emotional well-being. What I am suggesting is that what you tell yourself before bed impacts how you feel in the morning. So, you must take responsibility for setting yourself up for success at bedtime so that you can wake up each morning feeling energized and excited, regardless of how many hours of sleep you get.
So, how many hours of sleep do you really need? You tell me.
We will talk more about setting up a bedtime ritual to help you optimize your sleep in “Chapter 11: The Miracle Evening.” And if you’d like to delve even deeper into learning how to optimize your sleep, I recommend reading Sleep Smarter: 21 Proven Tips to Sleep Your Way to a Better Body, Better Health, and Bigger Success by Shawn Stevenson. It’s a favorite of mine, and one of the most well-researched books on the topic of sleep.
The Secret to Making Every Morning Feel Like Christmas
Think back to a time in your life when you couldn’t wait to wake up in the morning. Maybe it was to catch an early flight for a vacation that you’d been anticipating for months. Maybe it was growing up, looking forward to your first day of school. Or your first day at a new job. Maybe it was your wedding day or your birthday. Personally, I was never more excited and energized to wake up in the morning—regardless of how many hours of sleep I got—than when I was a kid on Christmas morning. Maybe you can relate?
Whatever those occasions were for you, how did you feel when those mornings arrived? Did you have to drag yourself out of bed? Doubtful. On mornings like these, we can’t wait to wake up! We do so feeling energized and genuinely excited. We quickly toss the covers off and spring to our feet, ready to take on the day! Imagine if this is what every day of your life is like. It can be.
The Miracle Morning is largely about recreating the experience of waking up feeling energized and excited, and doing so every day of your life, for the rest of your life! It’s simply a matter of taking a few minutes to set your intention before bed and consciously decide how you are going to feel when you wake up in the morning. It’s about starting your day with purpose—not because you have to but because you genuinely want to—and dedicating time to developing yourself into the person you need to be to create the most extraordinary, fulfilling, and abundant life you can imagine.
But wait—for those of us who spent most of our lives believing that we are not morning people, there may be one final obstacle to us waking up excited every day, ready to jump out of bed and create the lives we want. Which obstacle am I speaking of? It is the almost irresistible temptation of . . . the snooze button.