4 effective ways to help you wake up when it’s still dark outside

Winter is coming soon enough. Many people love this time of year for holidays, snow-covered streets and slides. But everything has its pros and cons: in winter, as you know, the daylight hours are minimized and it becomes harder to get up, because in the morning it is still dark outside. But there are a few recommendations and behavioral habits that can save you from sleep deprivation in winter.

somnologist, therapist, clinical psychologist, Ph.

In winter, it becomes harder to get up as the office “polar night” sets in. We wake up when it’s still dark and come back from work when it’s already dark. In such conditions of total lack of sunlight, a person sometimes has sleep disorders, it is harder to get up in the morning than usual, and sleepiness during the day prevents a full life and work.

Collected four effective ways to wake up well in the morning, when it is cold and dark outside.

Normalization of the regime

It is extremely important to devote enough time to sleep. Here everything is individual, but on average a person needs eight hours to sleep. Therefore, it is better to give up gadgets an hour before bedtime, postpone the cases that you planned to do in the evening, so that you do not deal with them until deep into the night.

There is such a phenomenon as sleep procrastination, when a person after a hard day’s work tries to devote as much time as possible to leisure, postponing and putting off sleep for later.

At times like this, you need to think about how hard it will be for you to get up in the morning when you reach for your smartphone before bed. After all, everything you do on your phone in the evening can be done in the morning. This is the most obvious advice, but it should be taken as seriously as possible because the length of your sleep directly affects the ease of waking up, regardless of the time of year.

Waking up with light

An alarm clock is a wonderful device to help you wake up. It can be programmed to mimic sunrise, meaning that half an hour before waking up, the device starts slowly generating light, increasing and increasing in brightness.

As you know, light can affect the retina of the eye even through closed eyelids, and light rays thus signal us that it’s time to wake up. If you do not have an alarm clock at hand, just turn on the light in the room as soon as you wake up, so that the body began to receive signals about the light, about changes in the environment. This will make it much easier to wake up and wake up.

Άσκηση

When a person exercises regularly, his sleep and wakefulness states begin to separate from each other. Sleep becomes more concentrated, the phase of slow-wave restorative sleep becomes longer, and we get a full night’s sleep.

It should be noted that physical activity in the fall and winter periods is also a great remedy for seasonal depression, which is accompanied by difficulty waking up and increased sleepiness.

Don’t forget about morning exercise, either. The contraction of the transverse striated skeletal muscles tells the body that the person is acting arbitrarily, gradually waking up, and the wakefulness systems get the signal that it is time to turn on in full force. Of course, at first it will be hard to force yourself to get up and do any exercises, but you have to do it. It is important to overcome this stage and develop the habit of exercising in the morning.

Proper breakfast

Make sure you eat breakfast. The earlier the better. And we are not even saying now that breakfast provides a person with energy and starts the process of metabolism. The fact is that the work of the digestive tract is a signal to the waking systems that it’s time to wake up. This is where it’s important to choose the right wake-up foods to help you start the day right. This could be nuts, for example.