“Life is too short,” she panicked, “I want more.” He nodded slowly, “Wake up earlier.”

~Dr. SunWolf

The most boring thing which nobody wants to hear is free-advice. Most don’t care, while some like me, hate it when someone offers me free-advice. The irony here is that in the next few lines, this is exactly what I am going to give you.

It’s been 2 days since I had made up my mind to “cut the crap” in order to “Cut-The-Flab“. The first thing which I decided was to get into the habit of getting up early. You see, when we over-burden ourselves with too many routines all at once, we stick to none. So this time I am taking it slowly, correcting one thing at a time.

As I had said earlier, I needed more time to do things to get life back on track. To do more, I needed more time, and the best thing to do is to reclaim life from your sleep. I was staying in bed for too long for too many days now. I had become a sloth who remained in bed for anything between 7-9 hours. Which is plain ridiculous!

I have tried in the past to wake up like the navy seals at 4am, but that is just not possible for me, not at this point of time. Even waking up at 5am was something which I was not able to judiciously follow. It was always a hit-or-miss scenario, some days a hit and a miss on others and soon the habit would be broken. 

So this time I am trying to wake up just 1 hour before my regular time. 60 minutes is a lot of time to add to your schedule. 60 minutes is generally the time people spend at gyms. 60 minutes is a lot of time if used well. 

What good is just 60 minutes?

Right now, 60 minutes for me is about 10 minutes of pranayam, 10 mins of exercises and 10 mins of stretching. I know that adds up to only 30 mins, but I need the rest to just to make sure that I wake up at 6am every single day. It helps me to do things at my own pace and not feel overwhelmed by the waking early bit. It allows me to ease into the routine and not feel too tired or worked up. Like I said earlier, I need to make getting up early a habit first. So my only priority right now is to be wide awake at 6am and really not care as to how I spend my next 1 hour. These activities which I am doing right now is only to fill the hour and have no real direction. Once I get into the habit of waking up every single day at 6am, only then will I start putting more effort into filling up these 60 minutes. 

In the near future I see myself filling these 60 mins with things like walking, weight training and meditation. And once that goal is achieved then I will try pushing this 60 minutes to 90 minutes and finally to 120 minutes i.e. to start getting up at 5 AM. getting up at 5AM would be a good point in my life, but that is still some days ahead. So right now it is only making sure to get up at 6 AM.