Recently I have seen quite a lot of people talking about the concept of “early to bed, early to rise”. It seems that people are trying out this method for different reasons. The most common reason seems to be that waking up early makes you feel more energized throughout the day. Some say it gives you time in the morning so you don’t spend your whole day tired. Another reason people give is that it makes you more productive and efficient with your time.

I have been interested in this concept for a while now but could not really understand what the benefit of waking up early was. I thought about why people get up early and how they get themselves to do it on a daily basis. After all, in our daily lives we have a vast number of things to do and not enough time to do it. This doesn’t really leave much space for getting up early on top of everything else that people are doing during the day. I never came across anybody who was able to explain it in a way that made sense or sounded believable.

I will now try to explain the reasoning behind waking up early and how you can do it yourself if you want to experience this for yourself or just want to understand the benefits.

There are two mental changes that happen when people start waking up earlier regardless of why they do it. The first change happens in your daily routine, the second change happens in your mind.

First, let’s look at how people adapt their daily routine. In the beginning, when people start waking up early, they usually get a lot less sleep than before. This is because the body and mind have not fully adapted to this new schedule yet. The reason that you may feel more tired in the beginning is that you are simply not giving your body enough time to fully recharge. We all have different needs when it comes to sleep but the average amount of time needed for recharging seems to be between 7 and 9 hours, depending on how active your daily life is. When people try waking up early, they usually start with around 5-6 hours of sleep. This increase in time is usually not enough to make up for the lack of sleep during the week and overtime people will actually end up sleeping longer than they did before becoming an early riser. When we wake up earlier, we get less and less sleep in a given period and slowly start sleeping longer and longer again. This increase is on average about 1 hour per week but it does vary between people.

The body adapts surprisingly fast to this new schedule. When people first wake up early, they usually adjust after about 1-3 weeks and start sleeping less than they did before. The sleep reduction at this point is around 45 minutes per day, which was enough to make me consider trying it myself. If you want to try waking up early yourself, I would recommend that you gradually ease into it as I did. This way your body will have a lot less trouble adjusting to the new schedule and you’ll be able to build yourself up slowly until you reach 7-8 hours of sleep per night.