If you regularly wake up in the morning feeling like you’re ready to go back to bed, you’ve come to the right place. Today, in the dawn of a promising new year, we’re going to be discussing this daily struggle, and how instead of crawling out of bed each morning, you’ll soon be jumping out of it.

Here are our five top tips to waking up and feeling fresh in the morning:

Ditch Caffeine, Sugar and Other Stimulants

Enjoying a moment of indulgence during a nighttime snack may put the sweet in sweet dreams, but the taste is bound to turn sour when it comes to waking up in the morning.

Stimulants like caffeine, refined sugars and nicotine all enjoy a powerful influence over the course of the sleep cycle, with many studies observing its powerful hold and the longterm disruption it causes. When we place these substances in our system, they clog the roadways and create a tiresome feeling of sluggishness.

Sugar is especially guilty of this crime. When you consume refined sugar, you’re throwing your system into a fluctuating wave of mood swings. Sugar makes us feel elated, and can even suppress a natural appetite. But when that sweet feeling comes crashing down, it brings your emotions with it, and can even cause sleep disruption through the associated cravings.

It’s a tough thing to ask, but if you can reduce your sugar intake, even just in the run-up to bedtime, you’ll begin to rise a lot easier whilst feeling much better in the morning.

Block Out the Blue Light

If you’re a regular here, you may be familiar with the notorious influence of blue light; something that we’ve discussed quite a bit throughout our previous blogs.

Problems with blue light don’t arise when you check your phone in the morning, but rather, from scrolling and glaring at it for hours on end before you go to sleep.

What blue light exposure does is it hampers the body’s natural production of the sleep hormone melatonin, so when you’re under the covers at night checking your feed, the light from your phone (and most other active devices) is stopping you from feeling tired.

This results in a lack of sleepiness and hampers the ability to enjoy truly deep sleep. And when you do wake up in the morning, you’re going to feel much more tired and drained due to having the quality and quantity of your sleep restricted by blue light the night before.

There is however a solution to this issue, and we’d like to really recommend these blue light blocking glasses. They reduce blue light exposure by up to 90 per cent, and are the ideal tool to have to hand if you find yourself having to look at a screen late at night.

Build A Routine and Stick To It

The human body loves a routine, and our system has the extraordinary ability to predict and prepare for an event that it knows usually happens around the same time every day. In this way, you can cultivate your sleep cycle into a dedicated habit, and over time your cycle will naturally adjust so that it performs better at these times.

If you were, for example, to go to sleep around the same time every night and rise again around the same time every day, over time the body would adjust so that the process becomes more of a regimented habit and less of a struggle.

On the other hand, if you were to follow a more erratic and unpredictable sleeping pattern, which is often the case with people working shifts or working nights, you’ll be constantly resetting the standard for your sleep cycle; making it a lot harder to follow on a day-by-day basis.

Start the Day Ahead

As much as the ability to wake up feeling fresh and reenergised relies on
what you’re doing during the run up to sleep, it’s also dependent on what you do in the hour immediately after you wake up.

It’s this first hour that’s the most important, and it's really a case of starting the day as you mean to go on. So to do this, we’d recommend enjoying a balanced breakfast alongside a good glass of water at least within an hour of getting up.

This simple act of consuming will satisfy your low-level glycogen stores, and will help to rectify your hormone levels, both of which will be out of balance after eight hours of unconsciousness.

Beginning your day in this way will transform how you feel, not just when you’re waking up, but in the many hours between waking and going to sleep.

Snooze you Lose

Understanding why hitting the snooze button in the morning is so bad for your sleep and your experience of wakefulness comes with taking a look at what  happens in the body when you’re actually asleep.

When you first go to sleep, your system enters a period known as ‘light sleep’. This phase usually lasts between five and ten minutes, before the body enters the next stage called ‘deep sleep’. This 90-minute phase is when the body rebuilds damaged tissue, including bone matter and muscle tissue, and it’s during deep sleep that the body is able to reinforce its immune system.

Going yet deeper, once this phase is completed, the body enters another period known as ‘rapid eye movement (REM)’, a time when the brain is most active and usually when dreams occur. When your alarm sounds in the morning, your cycle will be close to finishing its REM stage, and so will naturally be at the peak of functionality.

But when we indulge in that snooze button, we’re throwing the body back into that sleep cycle, causing the system to enter a tailspin of not knowing when to wake up. Again and again, and with each passing press of snooze, your cycle becomes ever more confused and less prompt.

So to wake up feeling fresh in the morning, take advantage of that natural REM high and rise on the very first alarm.

Sticking to a Routine, Nutrition and Willpower

These are just a few really solid techniques to beating the drain of a restless night. There are also more physical techniques that you can use, including this arrangement of stretches, which will help to push fresh oxygen and energy into your system.

If you’re a night owl or the type of person who regularly sleeps later and wakes up later, but you’re interested in enjoying the morning a bit more, we’d recommend doing a hard reset.

This involves waking up at a specific target, so regardless of whether you sleep late or not, the next morning you’re going to get up at 8am for example. You’ll feel tired and drained throughout the day, but you’ll be able to utilise that tiredness to score an early night the next time you go to bed.

But it’s also worth noting that good sleep comes from a good sleeping environment, and cultivating your surroundings to be ‘just right’ will reap a whole host of benefits for every unique stage of the sleep cycle; and especially when it comes to feeling ready to go in the morning.

What’s the Best Sleeping Environment?

When you’re setting up your sleeping sanctuary, there are a couple of things you’ll be needing to put right. Firstly, remember that darkness is ideal for promoting tiredness and advocating good sleep, so try sleeping with a 3D Contoured Blackout Sleep Mask to keep the light away.

Lavender is also a really powerful natural tool you can use to induce sleep, so try adding a few sprays of this Lavender Sleep Spray to your pillowcase, and you’ll be away in your dreams in no time! And so that disruptive physical aches and pains aren’t invited to your sleeping session, try out this soothing Body Wrap to really round off the peaceful experience.

For more helpful tools to sleep well, and to wake up on the right side of the bed in the morning, discover our extensive Sleep SMUG collection here.

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