Night Owl to Morning Bird

“Umm...err...I never thought I would ask you this, of all people - but - you know, I am struggling with keeping up with an ideal routine lately - I don’t get up as early as I would like to, and am unable to find time for exercising - something I would like to. Since you seem to have worked out a solution for these things - and I know for a fact that you have been an epitome of laziness almost all your life - are there any tips you can share with me?” - One of my best friends asked me this question a while back, with considerable consternation.

I had to smile. This was the second person in one week who was asking me something on the line of - how do you get up early and exercise on a regular basis? And like my friend rightly indicated, it was not only ironic, it was unthinkable a year ago. But the fact is, after exemplifying extreme laziness in the thirty years of my personal life, things have changed for me, and to be honest, I am incredibly proud of this. This does not mean I don’t have my lazy days anymore. But now, such days happen once in a while, instead of every weekend.

Now, there are various reasons why this has happened, and this is not an overnight phenomena for sure. But I don’t want to delve into the depths of these reasons in this post. In a nutshell, things changed because my priorities changed - I wanted more time for myself, and more out of my days, and I realized that getting up early was the only way I could make it happen. And gradually, I worked towards becoming an early riser (I am still perfecting this method - but I am much better at it now than ever.) In this post, I share my tips for rising early on a regular basis.

1. Realize That it is All in Your Head: For almost all my life, I believed that I was just not a morning person. And therefore, it was impossible for me to get up early and be perky on the same day. But once I decided that I wanted to become someone who could happily rise early and go about her day - lo and behold, I could become one. Now, when there are days when I feel sleepy at 9 PM - I can’t help but imagine how my past self would have been horrified at the thought. Sleeping at 9 PM? Get a life! And my current, supposedly wiser self, smiles. I do have a life. It just starts early in the day.
2. Do It Backwards: Accept that to be able to get up early in the morning, you will have to sleep early at night. Obvious, right? Not really. I have met several people lately who want to get up early, but are shocked at the thought of sleeping early. If you don’t think you can go to sleep earlier than you do at present, then don’t try to wake up earlier than you do - because it is unfair to your body. It needs the rest - respect that need. You would have an idea whether you need six hours or eight to feel fresh - use some basic maths and deduct the number of hours you need to sleep from the time you want to get up. For example, if you need eight hours of sleep and want to get up at 6 AM, then you should be asleep by 10. You may even have to go to bed with an hour’s buffer - in case you read or toss and turn in the bed for some time before entering deep slumber.
3. Have Something to Look Forward to: If you hate exercising, and that’s the first item on your list the moment you get up, chances are you will have a strong urge to go back to sleep even if you do wake up at the desired time. Like my friend - she said she continued to sleep for longer because she felt she had the time and nothing better to do. But she would feel bad later for sleeping meaninglessly. So I suggested she schedule an activity which she really enjoys - as the first thing she would do after getting up early. And she almost jumped with joy. “Yes!” She said - “I can paint in the morning - I never get the time to do that during the week and I really enjoy it!” You can decide what works for you - I am sure there will be some activity which you wish you had more time for. You can use it as an incentive to get out of the bed.
4. Stop Using an Alarm: There was nothing that drove me crazier than the persistent ringing of my alarm - as if it was the alarm’s fault for ringing at the exact time I had set for it to wake me up. I would repeatedly snooze it till the time when even a minute’s further delay would cause me to get late for whatever I had to do. It was extremely annoying and stressful, and I invariably woke up grumpy, at having been yanked out of my precious sleep. For the last year or so, I have tried to do away with the alarm as much as possible. Except for catching an early morning flight, or other such early appointments - I try and wake up on my own. When I was beginning to do this, I reminded myself there was a time when there were no alarm clocks - and people still got up and went about their business. I also remembered a tip my grandmother gave me when I was a child - of telling my pillow when I would like to wake up - and let it do the job instead of an alarm clock. I think the idea is that our bodies have a clock of their own, and our minds can be trained to follow instructions. After some initial experiments and a few days, I realized that if I trained myself, in due course, my eyes would automatically open at the time I wanted to wake up - irrespective of the time I went to sleep, without the external intervention of an alarm. Now, I may choose to go back to sleep when that happens, or I may choose to get up - but I will wake up at the required hour or a few minutes here and there - for sure.
5. Do It Gradually: If you wake up at 8 AM on a regular day, and suddenly want to rise at 5 AM - it may be too drastic a step. Try and take smaller steps, inching towards your goal. So target 7:30 or 7:00 at first - depending upon how much you want to push yourself. Try and do it for a few days or weeks. And once you find yourself automatically opening your eyes at 7:00 AM several days in a row, you are ready to move to an earlier hour - if that is what you desire.

All these steps have helped me convert to a morning person from a night owl. I now enjoy my mornings and look forward to them. There is one last piece of motivation that I share with people close to me - those who have known the night owl me - that if I can do it, anyone can do it. You just have to really, really want it.   

Run, Yashi, Run!

I was running with all my might. Despite being breathless and tired, I could not give up. Everyone was watching me, and I had to finish what I had started. I wanted to look around and see how the others were doing, but that could slow me down. Instead, I kept going as fast as it was physically possible for me to go. As I finally reached the next runner, and handed her the thin wooden stick being used as a baton, I almost collapsed with relief at having made it. She took the stick without much reaction, and off she went, continuing the relay race. My eyes were following her as I cheered her to run faster, when I realized that she was far behind the other teams, and we were definitely going to lose. Because of me. We were ahead when the baton was handed over to me. I had slowed down our team, despite my best efforts. And there is little else that weighs down a ten year old than being the person solely responsible for his or her team’s loss at the school’s annual sports event.

That’s my earliest memory of ever participating in a race. After this experience, and a couple of others, I simply pegged myself as a non-athletic person. I was too thin, too low on energy, too weak. And I definitely could not run or be good at outdoor sports. So, throughout the rest of school, I spent the sports period talking to my friends, promptly felt faint during Physical Training (PT) sessions, and participated primarily in carrom competitions during the annual sports meets that followed. On a dare, I did volunteer to participate in a tug-of-war when I was in high school (and believe it or not, my team won it!) - but I heard more jokes than cheers about my being on the team. In fact, I myself was mighty surprised at being selected in the first place, and distinctly remember the resigned face of my sports teacher when he had called out my name. I guess he was desperately short of people.

As a result of this mindset, I did very little physical activity till about twenty nine years of age. The fact that I was naturally thin meant that I did not need to exercise even for the sake of vanity. I was always on the other side of the weight spectrum, frustrated about the lack of weight gaining advice out there. But somewhere around my twenty ninth birthday, things began to change. My health kind of broke down, and as I lay sick on the bed for almost a month, I felt a need to change my outlook towards my health, and make it a priority. It’s funny how years of nagging (from people wiser than you) can’t convince you of something you realize within a few weeks through your own mistakes. That’s what happened, and I found myself resolving to eat better, exercise, and generally take care of my health. The fact that years of eating junk food had considerably widened my midsection by then made the need for exercising even more acute.

Over the last three years, I have experimented with various forms of exercising, including gym, zumba classes, swimming, and running. But I don’t think I have ever truly challenged myself. Perhaps that’s why despite three years of more or less regular exercising, my weight has remained constant, and so has my waistline.

In the last few months in California, I have frequently heard of/seen people challenging themselves in various ways. Some run marathon after marathon, some cycle for over five hundred miles in a few days, some comfortably hike up hills with an infant on their back (frequently overtaking me as I pause and pant at every meter of elevation gain.) Ever since I came here, I have often found myself wondering - if they can push themselves to such an extent, why can’t I do it just a little bit? And after much thought, I have concluded that once again, I am restricted only by my own beliefs. If I truly want to, I can do any of those things.

That’s why when I heard of a marathon training group which claims to get even couch potatoes running a marathon, I decided to believe them, and enrolled myself in their half-marathon training (yes, I do not have the heart for a full-marathon yet.) The race is in October, and the training has already begun. I had an interesting first day, more on that in a separate post. But I am happy to say that I am truly thrilled at having taken this step (with enormous support and cheer from people around me.) Back in school when I was dejected over having let my team down in the relay race, convinced that I was not one who could run, I could not have imagined that one day, I would be doing this.