Why People Oversleep

There are some different reasons for oversleeping and staying in bed for too long:

• Not hearing the alarm ring: What can I say about this one? Actually, the solution is kinda easy in this case: Get a louder alarm clock! If you regularly miss your alarm you should change something about it.
• Drugs: I don’t want to talk a lot about this point as it’s pretty obvious. If you’re too drunk to stand up, how do you think you could get out of bed on time? Same applies to some other drugs. Just don’t do drugs if you want to wake up at a precise time the following day. (Drinking a lot of coffee can have negative effects on your sleep as well.)
• Tricking yourself to stay in bed: This is where it starts to get interesting. And basically, that’s the point this article really is about. The problem with it is: This sort of tricking yourself has become a habit for most of us. Especially on weekends. You’re giving away valuable time this way. Solving this problem takes some time as you will have to replace the habit of tricking yourself to stay in bed by the habit of getting out of bed as soon as your alarm rings.

Habit Replacement

To replace a habit, you have to act according to the new habit all the time. This means you should get out of bed on time on weekdays and on weekends. Don’t allow any exceptions.

Habit forming is said to take about three weeks at least. So force yourself to stick to your new habit for the first month. Once it has become a habit, you’ll do it all naturally.

Some of you might be able to just use the new habit instead of the old one, but most of us will need some techniques to help ourselves to make the change happen. So here are some recommended methods you can apply during the habit replacement period in that particular case:

• Proper alarm clock positioning: Place your alarm clock out of reach. I recommend to place it just so far away from you that you have to get up on your feet. Once you’re standing it’s a lot easier for you to stay awake and your whole situation changed: Now you don’t need to force yourself to get out of bed anymore, you just need to force yourself to not go to bed again. That’s not that hard to do (or let’s say not to do).
• Don’t let your mind make decisions when drowsy: This requires a little self-discipline. But define your will before you go to bed and stick to it. It’s a major point. Your mind will come up with various strange reasons why you absolutely need another hour of sleep when in fact you just slept long enough to miss a whole vacation. Drowsiness is a strange mental state. And you want to make your decisions when you’re in a clear state of mind, don’t you?
• Motivation: Maybe you will need an extra motivation. You could reward yourself for getting out of bed on time for example. Any small reward will do fine. Plus, you should know what you can do after getting out of bed. Just make it hard for your drowsy mind to come up with any reasons for not getting up.

Don’t let sleep rule you, rule your sleep.

Autosuggestion can do the work of an alarm clock, making it possible for you to wake up at will.

As I first heard about this, I found this kind of hard to believe. But I decided to give it a try and guess what? It really worked! My inner alarm clock woke me up.

As I’m a sceptic, I tried to do it once more to ensure that this wasn’t pure coincidence. Guess what happened this time? It worked again! Of course, the method wasn’t working perfectly yet – there was a uncertainty of about 20 minutes – but I was completely new to autosuggestion at that point.

I think you might want to be able to perform the same trick, so I wrote this little article.

Here’s how you do it. Do the following process just before falling asleep:

1. Relaxation: Put yourself to bed. Relax. Feel the tension of your muscles vanish. Observe your breathing or do anything that will help to relax. When you’re completely relaxed, continue with the next step.
   Note: You will probably feel pretty tired at that point. Holding one of your forearms perpendicularly to the mattress is a nice trick to help you to stay awake during the relaxation, because your falling hand would wake you up immediately if you was falling asleep.
2. Visualization:
   • Mentally set your alarm clock to the time you want to wake up at. See yourself setting your mental alarm clock, feel the clock as you set it.
   • Now imagine that you wake up at that desired time. Hear your alarm clock ringing, mentally go through the whole process of waking up. Notice how it feels and see yourself looking at the alarm clock just after waking up, looking at the display of your alarm clock which shows the desired time.
   • Vividly imagine other clocks or watches as well which display the same time. Clocks of all different forms and kinds. Digital ones as well as analog ones, small and big ones in all different colors, all displaying the time you want to wake up at.
   • Then mentally repeat something like this:
     “I will wake up at <your desired time>. I truly believe that I’ll wake up at that time. My subconsciousness will wake me up at <your desired time>. I know it will work.”
3. Repetition: Now repeat the previous step until you finally fall asleep.
   Note: Try to concentrate and don’t fall asleep too soon. After a few repetitions, you can also solely repeat your mental phrases and let aside the imagination. Whatever works for you.

If you did all of the above you should wake up at the desired time.

If you’re not used to autosuggestion, be prepared that you don’t wake up at that precise time though. Half an hour later or earlier on is pretty good for the first try. So set a real alarm clock in addition if there’s any important reason to wake up at that time!

Now it’s up to you whether you give it a try or not. In case you decide to try it out, it would be very kind of you to drop a comment and write about your experience.