The struggle to wake up early
From as early as I can remember, I’ve claimed the title of Night Owl with pride. All through my teen years, I’d stay up to the wee hours of the morning with glee. I had jobs that required me to be up as early as 5:30am, but this did not deter me from my late nights. Every morning I would snooze my alarm at least half a dozen times. Then I would fling myself out of bed, skipping breakfast. I would, almost subconsciously, pat myself on the back for maintaining my late nights and get to work on time.
The unravelling as a mother
All of this, however, came unstuck when I became a mother. The wakeful nights made me desperate for every shred of sleep I could have. I conducted my mornings in the same way I did as a young employee. Putting off rising until the last possible second, I hit the ground running (nearly always in a fluster) to answer the barrage of demands and duties that awaited me. I regularly skipped over the basics of personal care, and let my personal prayer life fall away almost all together.
I have spent many years having to start my mornings thus. I was frustrated and resentful of the Pinterest articles penned by mothers who start their morning peacefully at 5am. So, I would try. I would drag myself out of bed, eyes burning from a night of endless feeding. And without fail, every single attempt would be thwarted in some way – my small babe would wake, or a child would come out to seek me out. This fabled hour of perfection before the rest of the family wakes seemed like a joke. I gave up on chasing it. Instead I miserably embraced the chaos of waking alongside my children and called it a success if we all got dressed and fed by mid-morning.
I continued this way for the first seven years of my life as a mother. I was firmly convinced that this was just my life until our childbearing years were over. And that God didn’t want me to be able to have any sort of personal prayer time with Him.
Facing the truth
I finally faced the truth that my family needed me to be more disciplined than I was. My soul also needed me to be more diligent in making time for God. While I might have been (begrudgingly) content to begin each morning all helter-skelter, my children (ages 7, 5, 3 and 10 months at this point) and husband certainly were not. Our mornings were becoming increasingly more chaotic, and I would spend half my day playing catch-up. I spent many evenings in tears with my supportive husband helping me work out the answer to the never-ending-ness of my topsy-turvy days.
We would paint our ideal morning scenario and work backwards to try and find our starting point. The answer would be me rising early before the children to start my day with orderly quiet, calm, and prayer.
Feeling utterly defeated as a mother, and oh, so desperate, I was finally ready to do all that I must to be able to make these early mornings happen. I had waited for God to make my life easier so that I could start to get up early. But He had been waiting for me to take the initiative, to prove that I wanted this time with Him. Only then could He, out of respect for my free will, step in and help to make things work. Here is how I got started.
How I started to wake up early
1. Discipline, not motivation
Before I could implement any strategy to get up early, I had to first work hard on my own self-discipline. I was previously relying entirely on motivation to get out of bed. Motivation is an emotional thing. What motivates you one day will not always motivate you the next and it is easily influenced by factors such as poor sleep and mental overwhelm. So I stopped looking for motivation to get out of bed early. Instead, I started disciplining myself. With discipline I made myself go to bed by 10:30pm at the latest. I also would make myself get out of bed when my alarm would go off.
2. Start small
I tend to be an all-or-nothing sort of person. If I get up early, then I want to get up three hours early and live an entire day before everyone else is up. I started with getting up just 15 minutes earlier than when my children normally wake. I would have no other objective than to make a hot drink and spend some time in quiet prayer. An extra 15 minutes of sleep does not – in the grand scheme of things – make a difference as to how rested you feel, but having 15 minutes of quiet does. I put aside my desires for great achievements and kept it small and simple. Over time, I built up to the point of consistently getting up 45 minutes to one hour before everyone else. It doesn’t need to always be all or nothing; it’s OK to build up slowly.
3. Choose a gentle alarm sound
Research shows that loud alarms can trigger a stress response, increasing adrenaline levels, and shocking a person into waking up. Not ideal! It took some trial and error to find an alarm tone that did not jar me out of my skin in the mornings. What sounded like a nice tune in the evening can cause a heart attack when breaking you from your sleep! A very gentle piano melody, that starts softly and gradually increases, has been key in allowing me to wake peacefully.
4. Be organised the night before
Nothing demotivates a night owl from getting up early than a messy space. By putting in some extra effort the evening before, I am much better able to convince myself that getting up a little earlier won’t be the death of me. On the busiest of days, when the house looks like a warzone, I’ll settle for just making sure that my reading corner is tidy, and that my tea cup is clean and next to the re-filled kettle. This means that I am able to get up the next morning and make straight for my chair and tea.
5. Prayer apps and podcasts
I discovered the podcast, ‘The Liturgy of the Hours: Sing the Hours’ podcast on Spotify, during a particularly difficult period of newborn broken sleep last year. Running on about three hours sleep each night – and often awake in the early hours of the morning – I was not in a season where waking up early was possible (or necessarily prudent).
When my days and nights had no grounding point at all, this prayerful podcast helped me pray the words that I could not find, and to simply work at attuning my heart towards God.
When praying is difficult – and waking early seemingly impossible – a beautiful resource or prayerful app, might be what is needed for the mentally and emotionally overwhelmed.
Work in progress
I am a work in progress. I still have mornings where I struggle to get myself out of bed. This life is a constant journey, and I doubt there will ever be a point where I arrive and can call myself a true early riser. I’ll certainly never claim to be a natural morning person! I hope, however, that over time – and by the grace of God – I can continue to make the small changes that serve me, my family and my home.
Kayla has been married to her high school sweetheart for the past decade and lives in rural Western Australia with her family of seven, where she devotes herself to homemaking, homeschooling and homesteading. In between feeding the family, tending the garden and milking the cow, Kayla also enjoys sewing and writing whenever the opportunity arises.
