4 Specific Strategies That Can Help You Get Out Of Bed

It’s a lot easier to get out of bed if we know how to.

It happens most days: the alarm rings, we struggle to open our eyes and we start tapping away at our phone to find the snooze button. All we want to do is close our eyes and rest for a few more minutes.

The alarm keeps going off and before we know it, we rush out of bed because we’re going to be late.

Our mornings are often accompanied by a fight with our alarm clock. It goes off and we want to silence it for a while to get more sleep. It goes off again and the same thing happens.

All this does is make us more tired and increase our stress levels in the morning.

But what would it look like if we could get out of bed with ease? No back and forth with our alarm clock, no thoughts about wanting to lie in bed for an extra 15 minutes and not rushing in the morning because we’re running late.

Here are four strategies that may help you do just that.

1. Use Mel Robbins’ 5 Second Rule

This rule is so simple yet so effective. And it literally involves counting down from five to one.

“The moment you feel yourself hesitate on something you know you should do, count 5–4–3–2–1 to activate your prefrontal cortex and interrupt the habit of overthinking, self-doubt and fear. Then, move forward on 1,” says Mel who is an author, motivational speaker and ex-lawyer.

It’s a brilliant way to stop talking yourself out of a situation or instilling fear in yourself.

Every morning we have this back and forth with ourselves without even realising.

When we hit snooze and stay in bed it’s our way of hesitating or talking ourselves out of getting up in the morning. We’re saying to ourselves that we’re tired and we need more rest.

And, a good way of interrupting this is by counting down from five and then acting on it when you get to one.

The reality is you can use this 5-second rule in so many aspects of your life. For example:

• If you’re scared of speaking up in front of people, it’s likely because you’re negatively interpreting what would happen if you do. Often it’s something like “I’ll say something silly and people will think I’m stupid.”
• But, the 5-second rule can interrupt this process of doubt and fear helping you to speak up because you’ve stopped these thoughts from occurring.

So, before you hit that snooze button and close your eyes again, stop and count down 5–4–3–2–1. Interrupt this process, and when you get to one, push that duvet away and get up.

2. Strategically Position Your Alarm

This trick is another really simple one.

Often, we place our phone (which is normally our alarm) right next to us on our bedside table. That’s because it’s a nice reaching distance so we can snooze our alarm or check our phone first thing in the morning.

Well, that’s one of our biggest problems for getting out of bed. We are giving ourselves access to stay in bed which makes it harder to get out of bed.

Instead, put your alarm somewhere else in your room that is not within reaching distance. Put it somewhere so you’ll have to physically get out of bed to turn it off.

And just like that, you’re out of bed.

3. Track Your Sleep to Understand it Better

Tracking the factors surrounding your sleep can help you see what’s affecting how well you sleep.

If you can determine this, chances are getting out of bed in the morning becomes easier — if you can figure out why.

To do this, for a week make a note of the things you’re doing during the evening. Are you having caffeine? Watching a lot of TV? Staying on your phone? Eating late? The list can go on.

Next, each morning on a scale of 1–10 (1 being easy and 10 being really hard) rate how difficult it was for you to get out of bed.

Now, look back and see what things you were doing in the evening. When it was easy to get up, notice what you were doing. Is it that you got a good 7–8 hours of sleep? Was it because you went to the gym and had a good nights rest so you woke up feeling refreshed? Was it because you spent less time on your phone and read a book instead?

You then need to look at the things you were doing on the days it was really hard for you to get out of bed.

Once you figure out the difference between when it was easy compared to really hard, you can implement more of the things you did in the evening that made it feel really easy to get up.

4. Have Reminders of Why You Need to Get Up

Any reminder will trigger your memory and make you think that it’s important to get whatever it is done.

The same goes for getting out of bed. Trigger your mind as to why you should get out of bed and not snooze your alarm.

Often, the first thing that comes into our head in the morning is that we don’t want to get up, we want more sleep!

Instead of telling yourself this, replace that thought with telling yourself why it’s fundamental to your life for you to get out of bed today.

You can do this by saying affirmations to yourself once you’ve woken up to push yourself out of bed. You can have it written on the wall in front of you so you can read to yourself why you need to get out of bed. Or, if you have someone there to support you, have them call you to remind you why you need to get out of bed.

You can do this and place your phone further away so you have to get up to answer it and when you do, you have someone on the other end telling you why you have to get up.

You just need to trigger your memory as to why you should get out of bed.

Final Comments

It can feel like a battle every morning trying to drag ourselves out of bed — all we really want to do is turn the alarm off, put the blanket over us and continue sleeping.

However, getting out of bed doesn't have to be so hard. We can easily implement different tricks to help us get out of bed in the morning, ready for the day ahead.

If you are struggling to physically get out of bed, give these strategies a go:

Use the 5-second rule.

Place your alarm away from your bedside table.

Track the factors affecting your sleep quality.

Have reminders of why you need to get out of bed.

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