I’ve discovered many benefits of getting up before my family does. Getting up early in the morning gives me time for silence, prayer and reading scripture with little or no interruption. Recently I found on zenhabits of other benefits. So, I decided to kick things up a notch. After all, there are things that I want to do (like writing) and I just don’t have the time. I figure if I can gain some time in the morning, all the better!

My habit has been to get up when I wake up in the morning (around 6:30 am). This gave me about 30 minutes before the rest of my family would get up. On Saturday and/or holidays I would sleep in longer. If I was overly tired, or didn’t wake up by 6:30 am I would sleep in and try to fit things in somewhere else.

Since most of the information I’ve read about sleep discusses how important it is to get up at the same time every day, I realize that it might be time to say good by to the sleeping-in habit. I’m not real happy about that, but those that I know that get up every day at the same time seem to not miss sleeping-in. Since this is an experiment, I’ve decided to at least give myself a month without sleeping-in.

My experiment is to set my alarm for 5:45 am. When the alarm goes off, I get up and I stay up. As long as I don’t head back to bed, I think I will be fine. The challenge will be to not give into the temptation to head back to bed.

The first few days went pretty well. Today…well…I was very tired and I am still tired. I figured this would happen at some point. I’m use to staying up late and even enjoy staying up late. Why get up early then? Well, as one article said, there are more interesting things to do than sleep. In the evening I end up watching TV. In the morning I actually do things that feed my soul. I figure if I can change my sleep pattern to get up earlier I will be able to have more time to do things that actually matter.

I really would like to get up at either 5:30 am or 5 am, but the way I’m feeling now I don’t know if that will ever happen. I don’t want to go to bed before 10:30, so getting up at 5 or 5:30 am might be stretching things a bit. I plan on reporting back on this experiment and how it evolves, so anyone interested can see how it goes.

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