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This article will teach you how to wake up early without an alarm. Yes, you heard that right.

In order to successfully develop the habit of waking up early, you need to figure out why your mind hasn’t already adopted this useful behaviour.

You know consciously that waking up early is important, otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this post, but is your subconscious mind convinced?

Our subconscious mind is much more powerful in controlling our behaviour. No matter how important we consciously think waking up early is, we won’t be able to do it till our subconscious mind is also convinced.

The key, therefore, is convincing your subconscious mind that waking early is important and in this post I’ll tell you exactly how to do that.

Recall the days when you woke up early

I want you to do a quick recall of the days when you woke up early. What was so different about those days?

You will realize that whenever you woke up early, you had something exciting to do that day. Something that was so important for you to do that you couldn’t wait.

In other words, you were subconsciously convinced that waking up early is important.

The main reason you failed to wake up early on the other days was that your subconscious mind didn’t consider ‘waking up early’ important enough.

What if we could deliberately convince our subconscious mind that ‘waking up early’ is important? Won’t it make waking up early a lot easier than to bang your alarm clock and move around the room half-asleep like a zombie?

Here’s a 3-step technique to turn waking up early into a regular habit…

1) First of all, find something important to do

If you have nothing important to do, there’s no point in waking up early. You could wake up at midday and still not feel guilty about wasting your time, because there was nothing to do with the time.

The first and foremost step is to find something important and a bit exciting to do. Even if the task isn’t that exciting, it should be at least important enough for you. It is recommended that you choose a task that you have to do at a specific time in the morning.

2) Convince your subconscious mind

Before you sleep, remind yourself of the important task that you have to do tomorrow morning. You can say to yourself something like, “I have to wake up early at 6 a.m. in order to…….” or “Wake me up at 5 a.m. tomorrow because……” The line you add after ‘in order to’ and ‘because’ is crucial and it won’t be enough to say “Wake me up at 5 a.m. or 6 a.m. ”.

Your mind wants a reason, so you better give it one. The reason should be compelling and important enough for you.

“I have to up at 6 a.m. in order to go for a run. Wake me up at 5 a.m. because I have to study for the test.”

It’s surprising how your mind exactly wakes you up at the mentioned time and people who’ve used this technique have told me that they sometimes wake up 1 second before the stipulated time! Others wake up minutes or even hours earlier.

Whatever command you use is up to you but make sure it contains a specific time and an activity that you consider important. Saying the command once to yourself should be enough but you can repeat it as many times as you want if you want to convince your mind more about the importance of the task.

There’s another technique you can use that can also act as a reminder. Just before you sleep, go through your to-do list for the next day and pay special attention to the important task that you have to do in the morning. Our subconscious mind takes written information seriously and it’ll do the best it can to wake you up early.

3) Turn it into a habit

Repeat the above two steps for 2 or 3 weeks till your subconscious mind learns that waking up early is an important daily activity.

When your subconscious mind sees you waking up early every day for a few weeks, it’ll come to believe that waking up early is an important part of your routine and it’ll start triggering this behaviour automatically.

A day will come when you’ll find yourself waking up early even if you have nothing important to do! But you don’t want to risk un-learning your new habit so it’s a good idea to always have something useful to do. The mind wants rewards, remember that!

In my experience, the only time when this technique might not work is when, at the assigned time, you are in the middle of a dream that your mind considers more important than waking up! Since that happens very rarely you can safely count on it.

Hi, I’m Hanan Parvez (MBA, MA Psychology), founder and author of PsychMechanics. I’ve written 270+ articles about human behaviour on this blog with over 3 million views and 80k monthly visitors. My work has been featured on Forbes, Business Insider, Reader’s Digest, and Entrepreneur.