Hack Your Brain to Wake Up Early & Effortlessly Every Day with the 3 Step Pavlov Method

America’s standard wake up method sucks.  Ugly air raid alarms that slap you in the face can ruin every single morning for the rest of your life.  Hitting the snooze for ten minutes only puts you through the mental scarring all over again.

If you can take 45 minutes to plan out a sleep method that pleasantly wakes you up when you want  then spend thirty minutes setting it up, you could make every single morning for the rest of your life incredibly better.  So you should.  Take a Saturday and plan it out. 

A place to start is my method.  I created it based on what we know about the neuroscience of habit formation and the bits of information science has discovered about circadian rhythms and biological clocks.  It’s not the absolute healthiest method of controlling sleep, but it’s the best way I know to sleep effectively and still live in a 9 to 5 work hard and play hard society.  

The Pavlov Waking System

Step 1:  Decide a reasonable time you could wake up every single day, even on weekends. 

Most people immediately shoot for 4:30 am, but make sure you’re willing to go to sleep early enough to get 8 hours of sleep at least 4-5 nights of the week.  I go with 7:30am.   

Step 2:  Pick a no-calorie cold drink you enjoy and leave it on your nightstand every night.  Iced coffee, iced tea, and water all work great. 

Step 3:  Start setting your alarm for the same specific time every single day.  When you get up on time, get up and chug down the beverage you left by your bed.  If you hit the snooze, don't chug the drink.  Since you’ve been sleeping you haven’t had anything to drink, and drinking a big amount of anything when your thirsty will give you a rush of endorphins. 

This pleasure rush will lay the groundwork for a subconscious habit.  After doing this for a week or two, your body will learn that pleasure is synonymous with waking up at 7:30, not sleeping in.  You won’t have to fight yourself to get up any more, you may even have to fight yourself to sleep in. 

When you get your “I want to accomplish everything” brain and your “I want to do everything that feels good right this second with no attention to consequences” brain going in the same direction, life gets a lot easier, and often a lot more awesome.  

Steroids for the Pavlov Method (make it work faster, better, and stronger)

1.     Train yourself outside of your regular sleep schedule.  This will speed up the process and allow you to engineer the emotions and fine points of your waking habit more intentionally.

I did this initially to reinforce my habit and leave less room for failure.  When you have some spare time during the day and you feel thirsty, you can take ten minutes to reinforce your waking habit.  Recreate the environment in your bedroom as much as possible to when you wake up.  Put on sleep clothes, turn off lights, get in bed, and set your alarm for three minutes.  Close your eyes and rest, when the alarm goes off jump out of bed mimicking the type of mood (keep it realistic) you’d like to have every morning, and chug down your drink.  The more you expose yourself to the sensory triggers of the morning, repeat the muscle movements of waking up, and then produce a chemical reward, the stronger and more subconscious your habit will become.  Waking up with beaming hope and energy for the day will eventually be like backing your car out of the driveway.  Happiness will be on autopilot and your set default.   

To boost the chemical reward, fake a beaming smile right after you chug your drink, genuinely congratulate yourself (out loud if your brave enough), and massage your own shoulders and forearms for ten seconds.    

2.     Make your alarm pleasant and distinct from all other sounds. 

Use your cell phone and get a customizable alarm app.  There are tons that are all basically the same.  I use “Alarm Clock Xtreme Free” for Android.  You want several key functionalities.  The first is to customize the sound of your alarm.  Make it a recording of your mother yelling at you about getting your prostate checked, or the sound of a koala purring, it doesn’t matter as long as you never hear it regularly throughout the day.  Making it the same as your ringtone or a song you enjoy or as an alarm you use for other things throughout the day will screw up the Pavlov Method. 

You may also want to look for the functionality of gradually increasing volume.  I use this feature to wake me up more gently.  Most full featured apps have the ability to slowly increase your volume from nothing to full blast over the course of a set period of time.  I use 1 ½ minutes.  This will wake me up more gently, but also not allow me to stay in bed for more than twenty seconds after I wake up. 

3.     Every single night, set your alarm far enough away from your bed so that your forced to get up to turn it off. 

When you wake up in the morning, especially if you didn’t get enough sleep, your lizard brain is in control.  Set yourself up with safeguards like these so that you can stick to your plans even if your half asleep and don’t understand the meaning of anything except crushing your alarm and going back to bed.  (If I drink too much or stay up too late, I have this problem in a major way.  My girlfriend has watched me get up out of bed, with only one eye half open, walk across the room to turn off my alarm, not understand how buttons work as a half asleep zombie, and just start pounding the phone against the wall until it stops, and then stumbling back into bed and going back to sleep.  Set yourself up the night before like the person your waking up is not you.  They definitely won’t be in the same motivated rationale mindset as you are in the moment. 

4.     Acknowledge that you’re not Superman and you need sleep. 

Waking up at the same time everyday helps you manage your sleep much better if you do it responsibly.  On nights that you only get four hours of sleep, you can still wake up on time, not screw up your work schedule or miss appointments, and then either take a nap or go to bed earlier the next night to make up for it.  Perfect system.  But if you start only getting four hours of sleep every night you’ll crash quickly.  Don’t let your hubris allow you to believe you can still get things done without ample sleep.  It’s as important to your brain in many ways as food and water.  You lose intelligence, decision-making ability, mood control, and impulse control the longer your sleep deprived.