Ever since I was a kid I was a night owl!
At first, it was reading. I spent nights reading books, I often went to bed at 4-5am because I was reading… I read books that ranged from fantasy to sci-fi, I read the whole Spiderwick chronicles before they made the movie.
After that it was games! Me, my brother and my father were huge game addicts, we spent hours each night playing all sorts of games, we played Age of Empires 2 and 3, we played Age of Mythology, we played Civilization 4 and 5, we played Gears of War, we played Magic The gathering, we played so many games! I often fell asleep on my computer because I was playing with one of them.
My mother was the one that suffered. While we were playing she was trying to sleep, and we were really loud gamers! Our screams at 3 am from one room to the other asking for “gold” or for “food” always woke her up, and let me tell you guys, you don’t want to wake up my mother in the middle of the night.
When I wasn’t playing games I was either watching TV shows or movies, and what better time to watch them than at night time! Avatar, Angel, Bones, Friends, Big Bang Theory, How I met your mother, Seinfeld, Fringe, Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and the list goes on and on and on …
When I finally had 14 years my parents let me go out into the wild wild world that is nightlife, and OH BOY DID I ENJOY THAT LIFE! At first, I had a curfew at 3 am, after 2-3 months that curfew was extended to 5 am and soon enough I had no curfew. It’s impossible for me to count all the nights I went out to party (some of them are literally impossible to remember, alcohol you know…), I started at 16 and “stopped” at 21, almost every single weekend I was out partying, even when I had exams I always went out to the local club. When I was 18 I put 1-2 euros in the piggy bank every time I went out, at the end of the year I had 300 bucks… and I was a heavy drinker, so I don’t even want to think about the amount of money I wasted on alcohol…
I started my gym life at 21, the same time I “quitted” alcohol ( only drink it once or twice a year), if you guys ever went to the gym you must know how tired a person is after working out...
After my workouts, I always get home, make dinner, eat and my body goes into full shutdown mode, I’m not able to do any sort of work, and so, I’m not able to study either…
Not being able to study in college is a no-no for me, college is 100 times harder than high-school, damn I didn’t even study in high-school, just what I learned from the class was enough, but in college one class has the same amount of content that 1 whole year of high school classes have.
So, if I had to study and I couldn’t do it after my night workout what could I do?
The only option I had was to stop being a night owl, be an early rise and study during the morning. And so I did it, and I found this “secret” little trick that wakes me up almost every morning at 7-8am without me doing anything, no alarm clock nothing… That trick is Sunlight!
I stopped shutting the blinds of my bedroom's window!
Every morning I wake up like our ancestors woke up before alarm clocks were invented, I wake up with Helios the GOD OF SUN shining through my window! That’s usually at 7 am, sometimes 8 am.
Another thing I do was start going to bed earlier and stop using the computer at least 1-2 hours before bed.
You must be wondering why this is better than setting the damn alarm clock… Well, that’s because there is a little thing called the Circadian Rhythm…
Circadian Rhythm basically regulates your sleep schedule, he does this through many ways, one of them is that, at night, it detects that there is no light (unless we are sitting on our laptops) and makes us produce melatonin, which is the sleep hormone that induces sleep, and during the morning it wakes us up when it detects sunlight (unless we have the blinders shut and no sunlight gets in)…
Just changing these 2 things has made wonders for my night owl behaviors, I’ve woke up at 7-8am for the past 2 weeks without even setting my alarm clock!!
Now, I can only do this because there is no street light on my bedroom’s side of the house, there are some people that can’t do this because of street lights, but we live in 2018 you know…
If for some reason you can’t do this and you 100% need to sleep with the blinds shut than you can buy a sunlight alarm clock that actually increases the light in your room for 1 hour before the set time, and, as plan B, it also comes with an alarm clock for the times when you don’t wake up!
Images are free source - 1, 2,3,4,5, 6,7, 8, 9,10
Question of the day: Are you a night owl or not? What sort of behaviors lead up to you being a night owl?
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