Last week I mentioned that I was in the process of making the switch to getting up earlier (5 a.m. being the goal) and going to bed earlier as well (10 p.m. being the goal) so that I could be ready for the inevitable work-life change that is happening around the Vardy household in the next few weeks.
So…how am I doing after the first week?
Well, the rest of last week wasn’t a problem because I was still in the Eastern time zone. So I was up no later than 8 a.m. there since my son also managed to do so. Hitting the sack at the same time also wasn’t a problem (although I had one late night at the tail end of my trip).
But the tide turned a bit on Monday.
I was still getting to bed by 10 p.m. on the first two nights (last night I didn’t until shortly after 11), but I wasn’t getting out of bed at my ideal time. Instead, I got up at 6:30, 7 and 8 a.m. respectively – all earlier than what I’d done before going to Ontario, but still off of my target by a decent margin. So I’m doing better on one end of the spectrum, but not so much on the other.
So I’ve adjusted the plan a tad. Here’s how I’m going to proceed going forward:
- This week: Bedtime – 11:30 p.m. Waking time – 8 a.m.
- The week of May 20: Bedtime – 11 p.m. Waking time – 7 a.m.
- The week of May 27: Bedtime – 10:30 p.m. Waking time – 6 a.m.
- The week of June 3: Bedtime – 10 p.m. Waking time – 5 a.m.
This way I am incrementally shifting my sleeping hours in such a way that I hit my target waking time of 5 a.m. by the first Monday in June and don’t try to make such a radical change all in one go. While I usually don’t fare too well in slight changes rather than wholesale ones, my body is clearly telling me it is having a big-time struggle with this change.
Let’s see how this strategy goes…shall we?
Photo credit: kreep (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
