Dreaming – Waking Up
by pre.
When you’re tucked up in a nice warm comfortable bed, it’s cold and dark outside and the only thing forcing you to get up is an appointment at work, it can be difficult to summon the energy to climb from under the covers and face the world.
Yet when it’s four hours earlier than that and you have to get up to go face a horrible journey across town in order to catch a plane to go on holiday, you bounce excitedly out of your slumber and throw yourself enthusiastically into the day ahead.
Which is better? Which fills you more with a lust for life?
What, exactly, is the difference anyway?
Your slowly waking mind naturally considers the next few things which are approaching it. Compares them to the warmth and comfort of the bed, to the immersive strangeness of the dream world, and rejects the idea of leaving for anything which doesn’t hold the promise of being better. If spending the next few hours in bed, cuddling up to your lover, sinking slowly back into the dream world, relaxing and doing nothing is better than whatever the next few hours are likely to hold it’s no wonder you end up hitting the snooze button, turning over and seeping gradually back towards slumber.
You need to make a waking rational decision, not depend on your barely functioning half-asleep mind to decide these things for you. Do you want to wake up and be full of energy to face the day, full of vim and vigour? Or do you want to hit snooze and lie and bed and spend the first half of the day struggling to find the motivation to move?
This isn’t as easy a question as it may appear. There are definite advantages to sleeping, to dreaming, to remaining asleep until your body naturally wants to wake up. It’s less stressful, less demanding, easier. It is a question which requires actual thought. It may in fact be better to quit your job if it’s not filling you with enthusiasm anyway.
If you decide that you’d like to be able to get up earlier in the morning with less difficulty though, there is a way you can go about filling yourself with the right kind of oomph to help you slide out from between the sheets and begin the day with that same excitement that you have when you head out at 4am to catch a plane.
The Method
The key to doing so is to have something to look forward to and to start to think about it as soon as you awake. As soon as your alarm goes off you need to begin to point your mind towards that happy, interesting thing. Something better than just floating back to sleep.
You need a boost to start your day!
This might be something as simple as breakfast. If the first thing on your mind when you wake up is the taste of a delicious breakfast feast, hunger alone might do the trick. If this won’t do, then you need to think of something else. Ponder the question for a few minutes. What kinds of things can you do which are better than lying around in bed all day?
If this means getting up half an hour earlier so you can spend some time doing what you love, playing music, writing a chunk of your novel, playing video games, watching the next episode in your favourite soap, then that is the price of waking up with energy. You need to decide to do that thing, so that you can concentrate your energy on it from the second your alarm clock beeps.
Once you’ve picked a thing, you need to train yourself to think hard about it from the moment that alarm clock goes off. To put that thing in the front of your mind so that you will experience the desire to do it.
For example, next time you awake don’t think about the dread of the working day ahead, don’t think about how cold it is on the other side of your duvet, don’t think about how exciting your slumbering adventures were. Instead, think about the taste of your breakfast feast. The way the cheese bubbles as you grill your cheese-on-toast, the way the Marmite stimulates your tongue with it’s salty goodness, the way the milk goes chocolaty brown from your coco-pops. Spend a few minutes letting yourself get excited about the very next thing you will be doing.
This is how people who naturally bound out of bed in the morning do it. They get turned on by the things they plan to do that day. By the excitement of living.
If waking with energy and excitement is what you want, that is how you will achieve it.