7 Simple Evening Habits to Transform Your Morning Routine

The morning starts in the evening.

Have you thought ‘tomorrow is the day, the day I finally get up early and attack the day, new day, new me’ and then the alarm goes off, you hit snooze and wake up the same time you always have? Of course you have, we all have. 

Good intentions really don’t account for much, it’s our actions that determine our success or failure in becoming an early riser. 

It wasn’t until I embarked on my own journey I realised that without changing my evening habits I could never change my morning habits.

By tweaking just a few habits before jumping into bed we can drastically increase our chances of waking up early and get our first big accomplishment of the day out of the way - not hitting snooze!

Here are the 7 super simple tweaks I have made to my evening routine that have enabled me to stick to my wake up time. 

Read to the end to find the one thing that makes all 7 of these habits IRRELEVANT!

Reverse engineer your wake up time

‘Right that’s it, tomorrow I’m waking up at 6.30am and I’m attacking the day with vigour’. You’ve had this thought before right? And when you wake up 3 hours later, you instantly blame the alarm clock. ‘It didn’t go off! I slept right through it!’. 

What actually happened is you were so tired you turned the alarm off and before your conscious brain could even kick in you were asleep again within 9 seconds and you totally forgot that this happened just a few hours ago. 

We have all been there. 

You didn’t reverse engineer your wake up time. See me, I need 8 hours. I can function on less but my body really does need a solid 8 hours. However, I typically fall asleep around midnight, sometimes around 1am if I’m particularly restless. 

Now if I want to get up around 7am then I’m waking up after just 6ish hours of sleep. The amount of times I’ve smashed the snooze button and turned the alarm off in just 6 hours of sleep is staggering. I have ZERO discipline when I have a poor night's sleep.

My failure was that I didn’t reverse engineer my wake up time. I want to wake up at 7am and I need 8 hours, then I MUST be asleep by 11pm. I can safely say that whenever I’m asleep at 11pm then waking up at 7am is easy. 

I backed up my clock and set a time I must be asleep by. Now for me, I take around 20 mins to fall asleep. So I have to be in bed at 10.40pm. If I fall asleep quicker than 20 mins then that’s a bonus. If it takes me 30 mins it’s not the end of the world. I can survive on 7 hours 50. 

Our body clocks are different. Some people only need 6 hours, others need 9. Start at the time you want to wake up and back up your clock the amount of hours of sleep you need. 

Want to wake up at 6am but you need 9 hours sleep, then you must be asleep by 9pm. Woke backwards from here. You might need to make dinner earlier or record your favourite show between 9 and 10 and watch it the next day. 

In some cases, this is going to be difficult because of life and work commitments. So choose a wake up time that fits your lifestyle. 

The important point here is to set your wake up time, recognise the time you must be asleep by and aim for that. But experiment with different wake up times and sleep times to find what works for you. We are all different.

Blocking blue light after 7pm

I just wrote an article called ‘The science of blocking blue light before bedtime’.

You can read this for why this is important. But a quick hack to block blue light on your iPhone is:

1. Go to settings

2. Display & Brightness

3. Night Shift

4. Slide the colour temperature to ‘More Warm’

I have set mine to block blue light between 7pm and 9am. This is a super simple hack to limit the amount of blue light you get before you go to sleep, which numerous scientific studies have found greatly improves sleep length and sleep quality. 

Prepare for the first task of the day only

I recently wrote about how my jump rope workout plan faded when I forgot to prepare my workout clothes before I went to sleep. 

The simple act of getting my workout shorts, top and socks out and having them ready for me to jump into made the jump rope workout a much easier habit to adopt. 

Think about what the first thing you want to do is. Workout? Get your workout clothes ready. Walk the dog? Get your outfit including coat and scarf ready and put the dog lead on top of it. 

There is a famous speech by Admiral William H. McRaven who emphasised making the bed. It was a win. The first win of the day. A small insignificant win that made it easier to complete more tasks and set the day up for a series of wins. 

So focus only on the first task of the day and prepare your outfit the night before and when you wake up all you need to do is complete that task. By outfit, I’m obviously talking about clothes. But if you want your first task to be journaling, then get the pen and pad, write tomorrow’s date at the top and leave the pad open on the table ready for you. 

You will be greatly surprised, as I was, at how easy it is to start the morning on the right foot just by preparing for the first task of the day. 

No late meals or snacks

You know that feeling of climbing into bed with a stomach full of food, I find this uncomfortable and it makes me restless. All I can think about is how full I am. 

I try to eat 2-2.5 hours before going to bed. This is enough time for my body to digest the food and I can sleep well fed. 

Think about what you are asking your body to do when you eat late night snacks or go to bed right after a big meal. You’re asking your body to kick into gear and start breaking down the food for nutrients. We want the body and brain to be at rest so that we can fall asleep more easily. 

Intermittent fasting is a great way to stop eating late night snacks. Choose one of the many apps, my personal favourite is ‘Zero’ and start eating during your eating window only. This will help to know when to eat and when not to eat.

Maybe one day I’ll do a breakdown on how IF affects sleep quality and patterns. 

Pick up a book

This is a personal favourite. I love to read. One because I just enjoy learning new things (I’m a big non-fiction fan) but also because IT MAKES ME SLEEPY. 

I read a kindle which means I’m not absorbing any blue light late at night, my wife reads a proper paperback. But both of our eyelids slowly begin to close after about 15 minutes and all of a sudden we are asleep. 

I genuinely think reading is life’s cheat code and a form of time travel. If you read a book written in Ancient Greece you are literally travelling back in time to the mind of the person that wrote it.

But one of the hidden benefits of adopting a reading habit is that it helps me to unwind at the end of the day, away from my phone and social media and before I know it I’m asleep. 

Pick up a book, any book that you fancy and for the final 15 mins of the day, just read it. You’ll soon see what I mean. 

Set a Do Not Disturb schedule

Notifications are how apps like Facebook and Twitter make you become addicted to them. 

Without notifications you probably wouldn’t think to open 75% of the apps you have installed on your phone. 

The notification creates a trigger that turns into action. 

Set a Do Not Disturb schedule on your phone, perhaps the same time you have your blue light block set for. During this time you won’t receive any notification pop ups. This helps in two ways:

• It limits the use of the phone in the evening

• When you wake up there are no notifications pulling you in

For reasons we will explore another time, limiting the hours spent on our digital devices either side of going to sleep is hugely beneficial.

A great morning routine is one that doesn’t involve diving right into social media as soon as you wake up. 

This is infinitely more difficult when there are tons of notifications from 10+ apps compelling us into action.

Setting the phone to Do Not Disturb is also great if you need to focus and be productive and much like the blue light blocking hack is super simple to start. 

Bonus: The one thing that makes all 7 of these totally useless and irrelevant. 

Going out after work for a few drinks? Going for a meal with a loved one and getting deep into a bottle of Merlot? Fancy a few cold cans on the sofa after a long stressful day?

I have found alcohol to be the biggest nullifier of the morning routine. 

Yes you could still do these 7 things but the effects alcohol has on the length of sleep and how many good quality hours of sleep you get make it very hard to have discipline in the morning. 

But that’s ok. You don’t need to stop drinking (unless you want to), but recognise that tomorrow you need a different approach. A later wake up time, a different morning task, whatever. 

When I am out with work friends for a few drinks, I set my alarm to a more suitable wake up time simply because I know that the effect those few drinks have on me is going to make it difficult for me to rise as early as I would like. 

Do the same 3 things before you go to sleep. 

Do the exact same things just before going to sleep. 

For me, I clean my teeth, prepare my outfit for the next day, read a book, sleep. 

I want to train my brain and body to recognise that I am about to fall asleep. 

I choose those three actions as my cue to the brain to start getting prepared to fall asleep. 

This mini-routine within my evening routine is as important as my entire routine. This consistency takes away any decision making I need to make and I can go through this mini-routine with ease. 

Try it. And then experiment with doing something random one night and you will notice the difference in your ability to fall asleep. Then again, this might just be the effect it has on me! This is a journey of self-discovery and you should do the same! 

So there you have it, 7 super simple evening habits you can adopt to set yourself up for early riser success. 

How many of these do you do? Is there anything you recommend?