If you spend any time on TikTok, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered some bafflingly elaborate morning routines: 5 a.m. wake-up times, a bevy of chores, workouts and journaling all before the start of the work day.
The implication: Anyone who wants to be successful needs early-morning workouts and green juice to stay fully productive and alert throughout the day.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with these routines, but building success with your sleep schedule is a lot easier than that, says David Creswell, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Carnegie Mellon who studies sleep.
By focusing on a couple key elements of your morning and nightly routine, you can increase both the quality and quantity of your sleep — without having to wake up at the crack of dawn. That’ll significantly improve your ability to operate at peak performance during the day, Cresswell says.
Last month, Creswell published a study of more than 600 college students’ sleep schedules, and found the less a student slept, the lower their GPA. That held true even when controlling for their GPA the previous term and how many classes they were taking.
“It’s not just for young adults,” Creswell tells CNBC Make It. “These issues around sleep and [its] benefits on your mental health and achievement are likely to generalize to other groups as well.”
Here, he shares the key ingredients of an effective, success-building morning routine.
Build a consistent routine
The first key: consistency. Establish a regular sleep time and wake time, and stick to it as often as possible.
That’s more important than the amount of sleep you get, Creswell says — noting that while he personally aims for “a nonnegotiable eight-hour sleep window,” there’s some leeway in terms of those “magic eight” hours.
Creswell leaves his screens and other distractions outside the bedroom, and uses a simple version of counting sheep to quickly fall asleep once he’s in bed. He counts his breath, working up to 10 and then…
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