How to Stop Hitting “Snooze” and Become a Morning Person: The Complete Guide
If you want a step-by-step guide that empowers you to wake up earlier and finally put your snooze button to rest, then you have found the article that will change your perspective, habits, and even your life.
This 9-step guide will teach you:
How to become an early riser (and even enjoy it)
Strategies that will help you to retire the snooze button
How to design your environment to make getting out of bed easier
The importance of creating a habit contract
The most effective ways to track your habit
How to get back on track if you break your habit streak
Let’s get started.
Jump To
1. Why I Wrote This Guide
2. How This Guide Will Change Your Life
3. Before You Start
4. Step 1: Make a List of Your Morning Routine
5. Step 2: Evaluate Your Morning Routine
6. Step 3: The Best Way to Form a New Habit
7. 3.1: How to pair a new habit with an existing one
8. 3.2: Use the “Two-Minute Rule” to your advantage
9. 3.3: Make it irresistible to get out of bed early
10. Step 4: How to Pair an Action You Want to Do with an Action You Need to Do
11. Step 5: Prime Your Environment For Success
12. 5.1: How to rearrange your bedroom to make getting out of bed easier
13. Step 6: [Optional] Lock in Your Good Habit by Investing in a One-Time Purchase
14. Step 7: Reward Yourself Immediately
15. Step 8: Sticking to a New Habit, the Secret Recipe
16. 8.1: 3 easy ways to track a new habit
17. Step 9: A Habit Contract Can Change Everything
18. 9.1: How to write an effective habit contract
19. 9.2: Choose your accountability partner(s) wisely
20. 9.3: Sign the social contract with your accountability partner(s)
21. 9.4: Display the contract in a place where you can see it every day
Why I Wrote This Guide
For over nine years, I had tried (and failed) to get out of bed without hitting the snooze button. Each night I would tell myself, “I should get up early,” or “I’m going to wake up early tomorrow,” or “I need to get up at 6:00.”
Yet, without fail, I would find myself settling back into my pillow after hitting snooze. With a noncommittal shrug, I’d let myself off the hook by reasoning I could try again tomorrow, or, in my guiltier moments, I would promise myself to wake up early the next day. I kept breaking that promise over and over again, letting myself down each time. Instead of confronting that part of me, whenever I failed, I took comfort in the fact that I could try again the next day, week, or year.
Eventually, I abandoned the idea of becoming an early riser altogether, because I figured I’d never have the willpower to stick to it.
This all changed in January 2021, not because of a New Year’s resolution but by stumbling upon Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. In this best-selling book, James Clear wrote one of the most powerful statements I had ever read: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
As I came to discover, it’s not a lack of motivation, willpower, or enthusiasm that prevents us from breaking a bad habit. What most of us lack is a concrete, detailed plan for how to make a new habit stick. Such a plan needs to include how, where, and when you should try to form your new habit.
At this point, you may be wondering: What’s the best way to plan for a new habit? Well, that’s where Clear’s book leaves off and this guide comes into play.
How This Guide Will Change Your Life
By the end of this guide, you will have learned how to write your own step-by-step plan that enables you to form (and stick to) the habit of becoming an early riser. To avoid falling victim to your snooze button, all you need to do is follow your plan.
Of course, I will be here to help you develop it every step of the way. After all, my mission is to help you to change your life for the better by making this guide easy for you to follow and understand.
So let’s begin!
Before You Start
Before you start building a new habit, you need to be on the lookout for any factors that could get in your way and prevent you from following through. Not surprisingly, if you don’t know when you’re engaging in a habit, you can’t expect to improve upon it or change it.
Bearing that in mind, your first step is to take an inventory of your daily habits so that you can become more aware of them. Quite simply, you need to notice what you are actually doing.
For example, if you wake up late every morning and are always having to rush to get out the door, it might be because you binge-watch Netflix every night until 2 a.m.
Similarly, if you want to increase your fruit intake and become a healthier person, watch what you put in your grocery cart and what you end up having available in your home.
For this first step, don’t label your habits as “good” or “bad” (yet). Simply pay attention to them, document them, and notice what prompted them to occur.
In Step 2, I’ll show you how to categorize your habits as “good,” “bad,” or “neutral.” This will help you to identify habit triggers, so that you can either avoid them or replace them with new associations so that they don’t have the same kind of power over you. More on this later.
For now, the goal is to get you to recognize your habits as they emerge, the good and the bad, so that you can become more cognizant of them and eventually work on them.
Step 1: Make a List of Your Morning Routine
On a piece of paper, write down all the habits that fall under your morning routine.
For example, my weekday morning routine used to look like this:
Wake up
Hit the snooze button
Stay in bed
Check for text messages
Refresh inbox to check for new emails
Open social media apps
Get out of bed
For this first step, I documented each activity on a piece of paper, no matter how minor it seemed at the time.
Pro Tip:
Do list your habits in chronological order. This will not only help you to identify their role in your routine and their value to you, it will help you to ensure that you don’t overlook any of them.
Like I said earlier, it’s critical that you avoid editing yourself during this stage and that you document every habit. Your only goal is to jot down your morning routine so that you can become more aware of your habits.
Simple, right? Congratulations, you’ve completed your first step and are already making progress!
Step 2: Evaluate Your Morning Routine
In this step, you will learn how to label your habits as “good”, “bad”, or “neutral”, and the importance of doing so.
Referring to the list you just created, place a “+” next to good habits, a “-” next to bad ones, and a “=” to indicate neutral habits.
Try not to overthink this process or judge yourself like I did when I was getting started. While you’re reviewing each habit on your list, simply ask yourself: “Does [current habit] help me to become an early riser?” By framing the question in this way, the answer will be obvious, and you can focus on moving forward rather than punishing yourself or feeling regretful.
Your process might look something like this:
Does [hitting the snooze button] in the morning help me to become an early riser? (Clearly not).
Does [procrastinating to get out of bed] help me to become a punctual person; a reliable coworker; or a good student? [Again, clearly not].
After I reflected on these questions, my list looked like this:
Wake up =
Hit the snooze button -
Stay in bed -
Check for text messages -
Refresh inbox to check for new emails -
Open social media apps -
Get out of bed +
Turn on YouTube or a podcast +
Feed my cat +
Step 3: The Best Way to Form a New Habit
Here, I will show you the transformative impact of habit stacking. By pairing a new habit (i.e., the habit you’re trying to form) with an existing one, you can build new habits that fit with the structure and flow of your daily life.
Paraphrasing James Clear [(2018, pg. 74,)], the habit stacking formula is as follows:
After I do [current habit], I will add [new habit] alongside it.
Let’s say you want to complete a mini workout before your morning shower.
Your habit stacking might look like this:
After I [brush my teeth], I will do [20 sit-ups].
After I [go to the bathroom], I will do [30 jumping jacks].
Or maybe you want to get into the habit of reading before bed:
After I [turn off Netflix each night], I will [read for 15 minutes].
After I [brush my teeth], I will [read 5 pages].
After I brush my teeth in the morning (when), I will do 20 sit-ups (how).
The key takeaway is:
Habit stacking is so effective because it provides you with clear direction on when and how to act on your new habit.
Pro Tip:
Be sure to select the right cue to trigger and layer your new habit on top of an existing one. In most cases, the cue will simply be a habit that occurs right before the desired change (i.e., the habit you’re trying to form). But not always. Your cue to wake up each morning could be your alarm clock, the warmth of the sun hitting your face, your partner getting out of bed, or even the smell of a fresh pot of coffee.
So, what are the best cues to make new habits stick? Keep reading.
3.1: How to pair a new habit with an existing one
Since your goal is to find the ideal place to layer your new habit within your morning routine, the best place to start is by identifying what exactly is making you hit the snooze button in the first place.
When I reflected on my routine and ran through my list, I noticed that whenever my alarm went off, I was reaching for my phone to hit the “snooze” button.
Alarm goes off at 6:15 AM
Turn off my alarm or hit snooze -
Stay in bed -
Check for text messages -
Refresh inbox to check for new emails -
In my case, the sound of my alarm was doing the opposite of what it intended; it was actually triggering me to hit the snooze button rather than wake up. Once I realized this, it made it much easier for me to figure out the best place to stack my new habit.
My habit stack looked like this:
After I [turn off my alarm] in the morning, I will [get out of bed immediately].
Now, whenever I hear my alarm, the mere act of turning it off triggers my new habit of getting out of bed.
The key takeaway is:
Notice the goal isn’t to come up with an elaborate plan to incorporate new habits into your daily routine. You’re simply piggybacking on a habit you’ve already formed, and are adding a new habit into the mix.
3.2: Use the “Two-Minute Rule” to your advantage
In addition to outlining when and how to perform your new habit (using the habit stacking formula in Step 3 and 3.1), it's important to choose activities that you can follow through on immediately.
This is where James Clear’s “Two-Minute Rule” comes into play. As the name implies, when you’re starting to form a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to carry out.
Bearing that in mind, I came up with this habit stack:
After I [turn off my alarm] in the morning, I will [put both feet on the floor].
This habit stack has the advantage of being highly specific, actionable, and easy to complete.
It’s specific insofar as it details when I’ll be carrying out the new activity (i.e., after turning off my alarm).
It’s actionable because it outlines how it will be performed (e.g., by putting both feet on the floor).
It’s conceptually and physically easier to put both feet on the floor before you get out of bed.
The key takeaway is:
If a habit is easier to do, then you’ll be far more likely to do it.
3.3: Make it irresistible to get out of bed early
When it comes to resisting a bad habit, our intrinsic motivation – i.e., doing an activity for its inherent satisfaction – can only get us so far. That’s why it’s necessary to not only make your new habit easy, but also attractive.
What I mean by “attractive” in this context is something that appeals to you to the point where you are more likely to follow through on it.
One of the best ways to make your new habit more attractive is to strategically pair it with something you actually want to do. The underlying psychology is that you are more likely to follow through on your new habit and have a positive association with it if it coincides with something you want to do.
James Clear refers to this strategy as “Temptation Bundling”.
To get a better sense of what this looks like, let's combine habit stacking (1) with temptation bundling (2):
After I do [current habit], I will [habit I need to form].
Once I do [habit I need to form], I will get to do [habit I want].
For instance, if you want to read more but you find it hard to resist watching Netflix every night, then your habit stack might look like this:
After I [brush my teeth] each night, I will [read 25 pages].
After I [read 25 pages], I will get to [watch 1 more episode of my favorite Netflix show].
It’s the mere anticipation of a reward that motivates most of us to act. So, by pairing your new habit with something you really want to do, you’re making your hard-to-form habit more attractive than it would be on its own.
In other words, the reward (e.g., doing something you really want to do) motivates you to do the thing you need to do (e.g., your hard-to-form habit).
In Step 4, I’ll show you how to leverage habit stacking with temptation bundling to make your difficult-to-form habit more attractive.
Step 4: How to Pair an Action You Want to Do with an Action you Need to Do
In this step, your goal is to identify the one thing that you would rather be doing in the morning than staying in bed after your alarm goes off.
It could be catching up on the latest news, making your favorite breakfast, journaling, mediating, or preparing a fresh cup of coffee. Of course, this will be different for everyone, so I encourage you to find that one thing that gets you excited.
Next, create your own temptation bundle:
After I do [current habit], I will [habit I need to form].
After I accomplish [habit I need to form], I will get to do [habit I want].
To guide you, here's one of mine:
After I [turn off my alarm] in the morning, I will [put both feet on the floor].
After I [put both feet on the floor], I will get to [turn on my YouTube playlist].
In my case, the reward (e.g., being able to turn on and listen to my YouTube playlist) motivates me to do the thing I need to do (e.g., get out of bed by putting both feet on the floor).