Summary

The author discovered that drinking water before bed inadvertently helped maintain their morning routine by acting as a natural alarm due to the need to use the bathroom early in the morning.

Abstract

After an embarrassing incident of bedwetting caused by excessive water intake before sleep, the author found a way to use this experience to their advantage. Despite facing disruptions to their morning routine due to gym and dining hall schedule changes, the necessity to use the bathroom after drinking water at night forced them to adhere to their early wake-up time. This unconventional method of using the body's natural signals as an alarm clock proved to be more effective than traditional productivity advice. The author encourages readers to adopt this simple habit to help preserve their own morning routines and avoid falling into unproductive patterns.

Opinions

The author expresses both love and frustration with productivity gurus, finding their advice both meaningful and repetitive.
They share a personal story of drinking a lot of water at night and its unintended consequence of waking them up to use the bathroom.
The author admits to feeling ashamed about the bedwetting incident but turns it into a positive by using it to reinforce their morning routine.
They believe that the bladder can serve as a more reliable alarm clock than a traditional clock because it forces one to get out of bed.
The author suggests this water-drinking method as an alternative to commonly recommended productivity habits, implying that these can often be ineffective or boring.
They highlight the ease of implementing the water-drinking habit compared to other more complex productivity strategies.

This Small Night Habit Saved Me From Destroying My Morning Routine

I had an accident.

I love and hate the productivity gurus at the same time.

They pose meaningful tips that could help you with your morning routine, yet they regurgitate the same boring tips over and over again. Nine times out of ten you can tell what they’re going to say next. You don’t even have the thrill of guessing anymore.

So why did you come to this article?

Probably for more productivity tips because who doesn’t want to be more productive? Well, here’s an unconventional secret to my productivity that I’m ashamed to talk about:

I drink water before I went to bed.

There’s an embarrassing story behind this.

For some reason, I always drink a boatload of water at night.

I live in a college dorm, so I go out in the hallway every night to fill up my water bottle. I don’t know if it’s something in the night water, but it always has a certain taste to it at night that gets me hooked. So I drink huge gulps of it after I take my shower.

That was a bad idea.

After I drank the water, I found myself waking up at the break of dawn to use the bathroom. One day, I couldn’t bear to get out of bed. So I laid in bed for an extra couple of hours, knowing I had to pee. So as I fell unconscious, I guess the pee just flowed out, and guess what…I wet the bed…at 20 years old.

My bedsheets were drenched, so I had to get my butt out of bed, go down to the laundry room, and start washing everything at 4 am.

How this habit saved my morning routine.

Before this incident happened, I started falling off my morning routine.

I made it a priority to wake up at 5:30 am to go to the gym, eat breakfast, and get some work done before class. Something weird happened with my financial aid, so I couldn’t go to the gym anymore. The dining hall doesn’t open until damn near 8 am, so there was no point in waking up at 5:30 am anymore to me.

However, I wanted to stick to this schedule because I could get other activities done during that time; edit a blog post, read a book, etc. I didn’t want to turn back into that person who wakes up at noon and barely gets anything done. Ever since that pee incident happened, it forced me to stick to my routine.

Who knew that your bladder could be a better alarm than your clock ever could?

How you can implement this in your own life.

Unlike most productivity tips, this shouldn’t involve much habit-building or 90-day plans to get started.

The amazing thing about water is that it goes right through you more than any other liquid. You can drink three gulps and pee in a few hours. Other liquids have certain salts and carbohydrates that take longer to get out of your system.

Here’s the route I take:

Put your water in a place you sit the most — for me it’s my desk
Make sure it’s filled to the brim — sometimes you might not have enough water to make you pee so make sure it’s full
Drink it as close to your bedtime as possible — drinking it after brushing your teeth helps because you’re already rinsing your toothpaste down

If you take these three simple steps to drink water later at night, your bladder will become your alarm clock.

Final Thoughts

I wish this hack didn’t involve sharing my bedwetting story, but if it helps you wake up in the morning, I’ll take the hit.

You have the power to save your morning routine from oblivion. If the productivity hacks from the self-help gurus don’t work, start using your body as an alarm rather than building meaningless habits that will disappear in a year. Force yourself to get up in the morning by adding a gulp of water to your night routine.

After you do that, watch the magic happen in your lavatory.

Get my free writing guide that can teach you how to build a writing habit in 90 days or less here.