become a morning person.

I woke up early every single day for a full month, and it just made me tired all day. Not only that, but I had constant headaches. :(

Maybe I just need to redefine my goal. I can be a morning person without waking up early, right? I mean, I guess the real point of this goal for me is to be more productive in the morning. It’s just so tempting to start playing video games right away, and next thing I know, it’s 5:00 PM. (No, that doesn’t really happen that often, thankfully!)

Every single day, no exceptions! Well, except for a couple days where I woke up at 6 and then went back to sleep at 7 or 8. And the many other days I took a nap in the afternoon.

But this morning I woke up at 6 and even though I decided to go back to bed, I couldn’t fall asleep. Could it be that I was actually (gasp!) not tired?

That would be a miracle! Because since I started this on August 1st, I’ve been tired all day long almost every day. I tried getting everything from 7 to 10 hours of sleep, and it never seemed to make any difference.

Anyone have any ideas as to why waking up earlier would make me so tired?

A while ago I didn’t feel well one day, so I broke my perfect record of waking up at 6 every day after about a week. Then I couldn’t go back! Things came up that messed up my schedule, then laziness set in, and before I knew it, a few weeks went by!

But I realized a few days ago that I have less than a month before college starts. =/ And if I’m not waking up early by then, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.

So, feeling motivated again, I vowed to stick to my early schedule every day, starting August 1st. So far so good! :)

And it’s not just waking up at 6. It’s waking up at 6, doing some exercise before breakfast, keeping busy so I don’t take a nap, going for a walk around 4PM, and always getting to bed by 9:30. Every single day until school starts. After that, I’ll see how I can work my personal schedule around my school schedule.

Since I started waking up early, every day I feel like taking a nap at 4PM. Then I end up sleeping for two hours and can’t sleep when I go to bed at night, which in turn makes it impossible to wake up at 6AM like I want to.

To avoid the dreaded nap, I absolutely can’t do these things in the late afternoon:

Lie down
Watch TV
Read

The #1 thing that keeps me awake is exercise. Yesterday I walked for about an hour when I started to feel tired, and it worked like a charm! These things also keep me awake:

Eating
Work
Video games
Taking a shower/washing my face
Lively conversation

As long as I keep myself awake until dinner, I’m fine.

Yesterday I hit the snooze button four times before finally just turning off my alarm. It’s hard to wake up early, but it’s even harder to be asleep at 10PM!

And I can’t have an earlier dinner, because I’m not the one who cooks it. =P And I can’t watch late night TV anymore. And everyone’s making this even more difficult for me by asking why I want to wake up early, asking if I want to watch a movie at 9:45PM, suggesting that I wake up at 7 instead of 6… As if I’m not already tempted to forget about this whole thing and just go back to waking up at 10!

And I’m actually awake. Ugh. I’m not a morning person, but I want to be. I want to train myself to wake up at 6AM every day and then go run 10 miles, come back, eat breakfast, take a shower, and get stuff done. OK, maybe I could skip the part about running 10 miles…

Lately I’ve found it difficult to go to bed any earlier than midnight—and even more difficult to wake up any earlier than 9 or 10AM. Then I waste time, and all of a sudden it’s the middle of the afternoon. By the time I get into productive mode, the day’s almost over! And though I’m not a morning person, I hate doing work after dinner. I like staying up late, but not to do work. =P

I got really frustrated with all that, so the other day, completely on a whim, I borrowed my dad’s fiance’s clock radio and set it to about 6AM. Turns out I woke up at 5:30!

Anyway, that was yesterday. I felt awful in the morning, but after playing a video game to get my adrenaline going a bit, I was mostly awake for the rest of the day. And what a wonderfully long day it was! I felt like I had jet lag or something, because the time didn’t feel right. I got so much done, it was awesome! I felt more creative than usual. And I don’t know if this is related, but I was also much hungrier than usual.

But I just hope I can keep this up. Well, when college starts I’m gonna have to wake up early. So if I can keep it up until the end of August, that’ll be good.