How (and why) to Get out of Bed
My bed, as is the case for most people, is a sanctity. It is so much of a safe-haven from all that irritates, displeases, and discomforts that we very often struggle to overcome the friction of getting up. Getting out of bed, a simple transition from the horisontal to the vertical, is infact far from simple. It’s mastery however, can lead to a far better way of life.
Part One: My time owns me
I’ll start with the caveat that this post is written by a student, for the (possible) benefit of students. I am aware that a good chunk of the population have little difficulty with getting themselves up and ready for the day ahead. If you do however feel that this applies to you regardless of your educational status, then please feel free to continue reading.
Upon my arrival to Loughborough, just before the official start date of the first semester, I was still used to staying up until the small hours of the morning, and rolling out of bed at noon (admittedly, later than noon). Whether I was watching Ali Abdaal recommend some insightful reading, or Martijn Doolard work on his alpine homestead, I would, without fail, end up sleeping at around 2am. I look back and forgive myself for this, seeing as I had the square root of nothing to worry about in terms of education, or any other commitments for that matter.
It was often as well that I would make a pilgrimage to a local pub with my good friends, and inevitably roll home at around midnight, full of guinness and whatever real ale the landlord had reccomened that evening. Whilst my post-pub slumbers were arguably longer than any night of sobriety, I have fairly strong conviction that the quality of those slumbers was sub-optimal.
The early-hours lifestyle gave rise to quite an uphill battle when it came to starting term in September. The compounding effects of a summer of questionable sleeping patterns and ten days of fresher’s events (the latter being rather self explanatory) meant that my internal clock was somewhat out of whack compared to its productive state back in the A-level era.
When it came to actually getting underway with the first semester, I felt as if I were an addict breaking a habit of a lifetime. Sure, I attended all of my lectures and actually got dressed for my online classes, but that was out of the fear of the guilt I’d feel if I didn’t make more than an ounce of effort. My attendance was tainted however by the seemingly inescapable morning rush of trying to squeeze in the essentials.
Shower, cereal, coffee, wash-up the relevant dishes, pack bag, leave flat, forget to lock door, run back to flat, lock door, resume run to lecture.
I knew that this was usustainable, and a pretty miserable way of existing. I arrived at my lectures or design tutor meetings with a shiny forehead and a faint whiff of BO, but more impactfully, a deflated attitude. I hated the fact that I couldn’t get myself up and organised in time to avoid running around like a coked-up ferret in the morning. It felt almost juvenile to get out of bed half an hour before I had to be somewhere. My lack of routine was deeply apparent.
September became October, October became November, and December became the Christmas break. Not one change in habit was made. My time had ownership over me.
Part Two: I own my time
A week before I returned to Loughborough to tie off the first semester’s deadlines, a thing happened. I’m not quite sure what that thing was, but I know it was a mental thing, and it was quite an influential thing. I even tweeted about it.
“Anyone else feeling like their brain has clicked into adult lifestyle design mode recently? The urge to get up at 06:45 and start the day at 07:15 is strong.“
This thing lead me to completely re-evaluate how I went about magaging my time such that I would have ownership over it, and not the opposite. A revolution that helped me to get out of bed.
Anyway, one of my goals for the coming year is to share my thoughts on this blog. It would be a good start to share some advice, to anyone who might need it, on how to beat your time into submission, with some very simple methodology.
The framework that I’ve sketched out to reduce the friction of getting out of bed inolves creating a sustainable daily routine.
It’s built around three concepts: separation, balance, and accountability. Each of which I have found to be fundimental to building a routine that actually stands up.
Separation
This concept deals with the admittely very common trope of separating your work from your play. If you have equipment that is necessary for your work, or indeed aides it by a significant factor, then I highly reccomend placing it in a distincly different location to where you indulge in your downtime.
In my case, architecture requires graphic work, CAD, image processing etc, hence it makes sense that I have a sizeable monitor to efficiently work on producing portfolios, renderings, and other technical drawings. This monitor was originally a meter or so away from my bed, and all I had to do of a morning was roll out of bed at 09:45 and join a teams call at 10:00. Was this convenient? Of course it was. Was it the best way to do things? Some would argue so, but I would tend to disagree.
The act of separating spaces will let your brain know which space is for which activity. We can’t study in bed becaue our brain puts us to sleep when we enter that environment, by virtue of the fact that for our entire lives, we have laid in bed to rest and recover. If we have a dedicated and noticeably different environment in which we only work on our tasks, then our brain treats this environement as a place of work, hopefully placing us in a more lucid and productive state of being.
There is an aside to be found here, which I find to be somewhat of a simple but irreplaceable pleasure. If our workspace is far enough away from our beds, then we have given ourselves a commute. A commute is you time. Time we have to listen to that podcast, that new album, or simply to drink in the morning. Sometimes literally on occasions, considering the rainfall of the midlands.
In short, give your brain that distinction it needs to put you in the correct state for whatever it is you’re doing. Make your bedroom a nook of rest, and your study (be it a favoruite library desk, lab, or studio desk) a clean environement of productivity. In doing this, the act of getting out of bed will become inherently easier, even if only by a little bit, seeing as in order to start your day, you’ve really got to travel to that designated place of work, in order to get anything meaningful done.
Balance
The second concept is arguably the most important element of routine design. We’ve all heard Bob Ross talk about the lack of dark without light, and the lack of light without dark. The same principle applies to our topic of discussion. There is absolutely no point in building a routine that simply factors in nothing but working hours, treating downtime as an aside to be filled in around our working ours. It must be that our downtime is allocated on an equal basis to our working hours. We are not dissimilar to the battery in our phones, in that we need to charge at the end of each day. I’ll leave this to you to decide how you allocate your downtime, seeing as different people have different requirements, but the rule still stands. For every period of work, there must be a period of rest.
The same is applied throughout the day, be them fequent small breaks or longer breaks between chunks of deep work, taking time to step back from what it is that you’re doing is a key step in actually getting the thing done.
Accountability
Holding oursevles accountable to our own aspirations, be them big or small, is a bit like marking our own homework. It’s very easy to give ourselves a pass on something. This becomes more difficult however when we deicde to bring our peers into the mix of our newfound routine.
All that this concept requires is to simply ask a friend to come and work with you, ideally in the same space, but if not, we’re all very used to hopping on a teams call and getting on with things that way. It becomes far more difficult to give ourselves a pass on something when we risk leaving a friend out in the cold on a Tuesday morning, especially if they’ve gone to the trouble of getting up on time as you should’ve done. A friend of mine does take this to extremes, whereby he writes out a contract stipluating that should the agreement be broken, he incurs a fine of a given amount of money to what I will call his ‘accountability partner’. Like I say, this is an extreme example, but the idea of an accountability partner is a strong saftey net for actually adhereing to what we set out for ourselves.
To be frank, none of the above is in any way necessary for getting out of bed in the morning. For some people, an alarm is simply all that is needed. For a good amount of us however, a little more is needed to coax ourselves out of our cozy night-time environment. If we design our lives such that we feel fulfilled enough to simply want sleep at the end of the day, then it must therefore become easier to rise the next day, ready for what’s in store.
I hope that if you’ve read this far, then you’ve found at least a sentence of value, and even carry that sentence forward into your daily routine, whatever shape that it may take.