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🗞️ TSAR: Art of waking up

🗞️ TSAR: Art of waking up

Issue #128

Andrew Appleseed
August 07, 2022

The early morning has gold in its mouth.

German proverb

GM ⛅

Welcome to the eighth edition of The Sunday Andrew Review ("TSAR"), our Sunday newsletter. They come out on, well, Sundays. What's the point? Choose one topic and go a bit deeper. I hope you like it. Suppose you don't? Well then, good, that's settled.

In classic AA🍎 fashion, this should still only take a few min to read.

On with the show...

Art of waking up

I have been seeing an obscene amount of bullshit online recently about how to wake up in the morning. Similar to computer code, oftentimes the best solution is also elegantly simple. So how does one wake up? You get up. No big red snooze button - that's a chump game. Whether it's your internal clock buzzing or your alarm clock sounding off, you get up and BOUNCE out, like a kangaroo ready to feast. You got a little joey in your front pocket and he's got to eat today. Yanking the snooze lever doesn't put food on the table nor money in the vault. It releases hideous bald vultures unto your willpower... and your willpower in a given day is a finite resource. A few more delicious bites below on waking up:

Waking up before 6 a.m. hits different. There is a reason many ancient religions and spiritual practices talk extensively about the "magical hours" between 4 and 7 a.m. Yoga, Islam, witchcraft...
The whole "get 8+ hours of sleep" tip is missing key conditions. One, 8+ hours is only good advice if you are roughly going to bed and waking up around the same times. Let's be real: that is not happening with most people. Most people, in fact, go to bed late, staring at their phone, sleep terrible, then bang SNOOZE countless times until the psychic guilt becomes so unbearable that s/he crawls out of bed. Then s/he checks their phone immediately. Our ancestors would laugh-cry at this habit. It's banana-land and we all know it.
- Instead, go to sleep when you are tired (could be 9pm some nights and 3am other nights) and wake up at the SAME TIME every morning. 5, 6, 7am, whatever it is. If you are underslept, fight through it and take a 20-30 min nap later in the afternoon. No longer than that. Said nap will almost always do the trick without your body readying itself for a full night's sleep.
If you go to bed earlier, you will wake up earlier. After a bit of practice, the need for an alarm will vanish.
Unless meditation and gratitude journaling is really for you (I am convinced it is not most folks out there), skip it. Instead, hop out of your cocoon of a bed and move. Straight away, 30-120 seconds of movement (max air squats, max push ups, a wall-assisted handstand, high knees) to get the blood going. Increased blood-flow first thing in the morning is the "caffeine" you need before that first sip of coffee.
After the movement is taken care of (remember, only 30-120 seconds bare min.) hold off on real caffeine for 90 minutes. Wake at 6am? Tight, now wait until 7:30am before your slug down the bean water. Same for nicotine if possible (but admittedly, sometimes I like a half-piece of LUCY nicotine gum shortly after getting up).
In general, follow the sun. Get up within 2-3 hours of the sun rising. Look up the sunrise in your Weather app and plan accordingly.
Ask bakers and farmers how it's worked for them. In this country, these pros have a heightened appreciation for the early morning hours.
Keep your room cold. In the 60s Fahrenheit. Even colder is better if you can manage. If you have a partner, this will be a negotiation. Sell it to them.
Your enemies - not the cowards but the real competition - are already doing this.

My old trainer always said the best time to work out is whenever you can. This too applies to sleep. You need seven hours of sleep? Bed by 11pm, wake at 5:30am, nap for 30m in the afternoon. There's your seven. A thousand ways to skin a cat. The sharpest knife in your pack is an early wake up.