As we approach the depths of winter, it’s getting harder and harder to be the kind of person who leaps out of bed as soon as the alarm goes off. It’s all too easy to snuggle back under the duvet… and inevitably drift back off.

If you struggle to get out of bed in the morning, you’re not alone. According to a YouGov survey, most Brits identify as ‘night owls’, with nearly 60% of 16-39-year-olds saying they’re better in the evenings than the mornings.

While no chronotype is ‘wrong’ per se, if you want to feel more awake and productive in the mornings, there are ways to train your body to adapt to an earlier start. 

Sleep expert and author Dr Nerina Ramlakhan insists that we’re all capable of becoming more of a morning person and that, for the most part, it all begins with our sleep habits. Below are her top five tips for having more energy first thing.

We can’t all fall asleep instantly, so it’s important to prepare for a ‘phase’ period between your waking day and sleep. “You’re giving yourself that time to decompress the nervous system so that you get a good, deep sleep,” Dr Ramlakhan says. “And that will help at the other end – phasing has so much to do with your ability to then get up early the next morning.”

From now on, Dr Ramlakhan advises creating a rough 90-minute period between the time you finish your day and the time that you want to go to sleep.

Ultimately, she says, this will lead to you falling asleep earlier and at the right time for you to get optimum hours of sleep. This will then help you out in the morning, because you’ll have had the correct hours of sleep, as well as an extra hour or so of wakeful rest to recharge your body.

In order to get your body adjusted to waking early, it helps to train it into feeling hungry when you start your day. If you’re craving and eating food as soon as you wake, this will signify to your body that the day has begun,

“If you don’t eat breakfast but are trying to rise out of bed early, you’re going to hit a metabolic slump,” Dr Ramlakhan says. This means you don’t feel hungry, so you don’t eat breakfast and then find it way more difficult to be motivated early in the day.

In order to train your body into craving food first thing, Dr Ramlakhan recommends breaking your fast as quickly as possible when you wake. This doesn’t need to include a massive meal. “Just a handful of nuts with a banana, or a nut butter and some toast is enough,” she suggests.

Then, later in the morning you can have a larger breakfast if you need it. Dr Ramlakhan says that after around three weeks of having an earlier breakfast, you should find that you wake up hungrier and more energised.

At the other end of the spectrum, Dr Ramlakhan recommends giving yourself two to three hours between eating and going to bed. She also advises reducing your alcohol intake as it can impact the quality of our sleep. 

Again, this is all about getting your body to crave something different. Dr Ramlakhan says that training your body to lean towards exercising when you first get up is a great way to ensure you feel alert throughout the morning, after you finish your workout.

“After exercise, you produce a cocktail of hormones – stress hormone levels drop, you produce endorphins that make you feel good and your ability to feel alert rises. These are all things you want out of your morning,” she says.

The key here is to take things as slow as your body needs, gradually incorporating exercise into your routine. It might start out with a walk, and then you can slowly build into a more tangible workout once your body acclimatises to the early morning movement.

Dr Ramlakhan recommends “a short burst of exercise in the morning, perhaps a HIIT training video or a short interval training exercise”.

“Rather than going too far too quick and trying to get yourself to the gym for hours, just start with short, sharp bursts of exercise,” she says.

For so many of us, coffee is the first thing we think of on waking. But to get your body energised as early as possible, Dr Ramlakhan suggests resisting the urge to have your caffeine fix straight away. “Caffeine reliance can get your body in a fatigued state when it wakes up, because it needs that caffeine hit to get going,” she says.

“Remove the caffeine from your initial routine when you get up,” Dr Ramlakhan advises. “Instead, prioritise eating small amounts of food, get exercising, then have your caffeine.”

This not only gives your body incentive to get through your initial morning routine, but it also allows it to generate natural energy first thing through endorphins and from your breakfast (however small it is). 

The key to a good morning routine is sleep quality – and that tends to depend on the environment you’re planning on sleeping in.

“Our lifestyle habits have become very much affected by technology and blue-light electronic devices, which suppress our levels of melatonin – the sleep hormone,” Dr Ramlakhan shares. “So it’s harder to get sleep, so we go to bed later and then it’s harder to wake up.”

Part of this process will also involve finding other more analogue ways to serve your phone’s functions, like investing in an alarm clock and keeping a notebook next to your bed for any thoughts you have, replacing the Notes app. She also suggests not using your phone for at least the first 10 minutes of your day, allowing your brain to wake up organically without the artificial stimulation of social media overwhelming your brain as it tries to adjust to early mornings.

In the morning, the smallest amount of exposure to light in the morning can help our body to naturally wake up earlier. If you struggle to sleep with your curtains open, Dr Ramlakhan advises letting a small chink of light in and gradually increasing it if you can, allowing your body to get used to being exposed to natural light in the morning.

Image: Getty