Do You Have What It Takes to Become a Morning Person?

The early bird does indeed get the worm. Whether you like it or not, it is a morning person's world and we are all living in it. Unfortunately, only one out of ten people is a real morning person.

Whether it’s summer vacations, travel, or just your day-to-day routine that messed up your sleep schedule, it is crucial to your health, work, and social life that you become a morning person. According to Elizabeth Petty, our minds are not able to operate to their full potential when we are sleep deprived.

If you are a night owl characterized by having to snooze the alarm multiple times in the morning, then this article is for you. Although your genes have some influence over your preference to sleeping and rising, you can become a morning person with a few changes to your routine.

Get enough sleep

If you intend to switch from a night owl to a morning person, the bottom line is you need to get enough sleep. Lack of sleep gives you the general feeling of being tired, sad, irritable, and even stressed.

The average adult requires seven to nine hours of sleep per day. To achieve this, you will have to sleep earlier than your standard time. You can start by heading to bed 15 minutes earlier each day until you reach your intended target.

Let the light in

Becoming a morning person is not only about adjusting your alarm clock but also to reset your body's internal clock. To do this, you need to expose your eyes to the bright morning light. The reason: Your internal clock produces melatonin, which makes you sleepy.

Therefore, when you open all the blinds and expose yourself to light first thing in the morning, this helps reduce the melatonin production. At the same time, this trick sets your internal clock to wake up at the right time.

No tech before bedtime

Long ago, people went to bed solely because the sun went down. That is not the case these days with the innovation of electricity and electronic gadgets. Research has shown that the blue light emitted by electronics like laptops, TVs, and smartphones can shift circadian rhythms making it hard to sleep at night. This is because blue light reduces the amount of melatonin (that good, sleepy hormone) that our body produces, making our brains more active and feel less tired.

So - keep off any electronic devices at least one hour before you finally hit the sack to ensure that you will fall asleep easily and wake up ready to take on the day.

Use mornings to enjoy something you like

Becoming a morning person might come down to how you enjoy your mornings. For instance, you can start by setting your alarm tone to something you want. After waking up, you can watch your favorite show while making breakfast.

If TV is not your thing, motivational podcasts might be a good option to try out. A gentle yoga session might also be an excellent way to start the day. In the end, it all boils down to doing something fun and enjoyable when you wake up. This tactic leaves you full of energy and happiness to face the day.

Watch what you eat

Finally, the food you eat can help or hinder your sleep. If you want an evening snack, foods rich in magnesium and tryptophan increase the melatonin levels making you sleep better. Such foods include walnuts, cherries, avocadoes, salmon, and even spinach, to name a few.

For the morning routine, it is better to eat proteins. This is because proteins increase your dopamine levels, making you ready for the day.

Conclusion

Backsliding is inevitable when it comes to maintaining a proper morning routine. So do not beat yourself up on those when the bed gets the better of you. Becoming a morning person is more robust than it seems. Achieving a proper sleeping cycle gradual process that requires patience and time. However, once you begin to reap the benefits of being a morning person, it will become a habit in your daily routine.  

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Image by pexels

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Elise Morgan is a freelance writer located in North Carolina who has recently found her passion writing about everything relating to health and wellness. This came about as she studied exercise science in school and hasn’t been able to let it go since!

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For more information on discorded sleep, healthy nighttime yoga routines, and Yoga Nidra and meditation for sleep, please see Program Director Dana Slamp's series Nighttime Yoga on YogaAnytime. PYI Blog readers get a free month of Nighttime Yoga using this link or the code word "SLAMP"."

Yoga Nidra

Yoga nidra is not what you think. It was created by Swami Satyananda Saraswati in the 1960s as a result of his being able to remember chants that he did not recall being exposed to. It turns out that he was exposed to them while he slept and young boys chanted them at a monastery in India where he was stationed. Ancient yogis, indeed Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras (1:38) make mention of reaching samadhi through contact with sleep and dreams. This is one piece of yoga nidra, which is often referred to as yogic sleep.

Swami Satyananda Saraswati realized that sleep was not a state of total unconsciousness. “When one is asleep, there remains a state of potentiality, a form of awareness that is awake and fully alert to the outer situations. I found by training the mind, it is possible to utilize this state.” ( p. 3) In the yogic view of consciousness, humans primarily focus on the aspects of our experience and therefore brain that involve the ego. However, there are other states of awareness - the subconscious and unconscious mind - that are not organized through the ego, yet are part of us and our experience. Most people do not have awareness of, access to, or skills to work with this part of themselves. Yoga nidra is a system for working with all parts of our consciousness.

Yoga nidra is a method of pratyahara (p.29), the fifth of Patanjali’s eight limbs of yoga, withdrawal of the senses. Yoga nidra is done in savasana, with the eyes closed. It is important to have a teacher speaking the instructions to you or for you to be listening to the instructions via a recording. Yoga nidra requires the relaxation of the thinking mind. You can not think through the sequences yourself. You must listen to them. The first instruction is to focus your attention on external sounds, which in effect withdraws the other senses. The instruction is to move your attention from sound to sound with a witnessing attitude - do not analyze or think -- just witness the sounds. Soon, the mind grows tired of this and you drop into a deeper relaxation.

This is when one of the defining features of the yoga nidra practice takes place: the rotation of consciousness. Nyasa, a trantric practice, taught a very specific and quick rotation of one’s awareness through body parts and with a mantra for each body part. The idea was to instill divine consciousness in each body part as the mantra was chanted. The specific sequence is based on the motor or cortical homunculus, which is the somatotopic organization of the motor cortex in the brain. Each part of the brain is identified with motor or sensory input from a specific part of the body in a specific sequence. [see image] The image is a distorted view of the human body because it shows the order and intensity of the sensory processing that takes place in each space along the motor cortex.

By rotating your consciousness through a sequence which follows the motor cortex homunculus, you heighten your awareness of the body in order to stimulate the brain, which induces physical relaxation as well as clearing the nerve pathways from the brain to the body. Further to the deeper relaxation, a “dissociation of consciousness from the sensory and motor channels of experience occurs.” (p.38) This continues the practice of pratyahara, withdrawing the senses. The body is relaxed, the senses withdrawn. The key here is to remain aware -- not to drift into sleep, but to become deeply relaxed, with the senses withdrawn and completely conscious of your experience. This is where the mind training comes in. “When the mind dissociates itself from all the sensory channels, it becomes very powerful, but then it needs training. Unless involuntary systems of the brain have been trained, there is practically no difference between yoga nidra and sleep.” (p. 30)

From here, yoga nidra directs you to become aware of your breath, again another practice intended to bring you into a deeper state of relaxation. Then the practice instructs you to feel your body in contact with the ground and to feel it being very heavy. Yoga nidra always starts with heaviness, instructing you to feel the experience of heaviness and then feel its opposite, lightness. The practice flows through several sensory opposites and then turns to emotional opposites (love-hate; sadness-joy, etc). The instruction is to experience these opposites, one, then the other, then both at the same time - not to think about them, but to experience them. This is a kind of mind training, creating new neural pathways that allow you to hold the experience of opposites together witnessing that they can exist not as one or the other but both at the same time. This is referred to as training in the “transcendence of duality” (p. 42) which develops a mature personality, balanced outlook, and calm demeanor.

Then yoga nidra instructs you to experience a series of images, named by the teacher. The images are usually symbols of universal archetypes. “Words and concepts are the language of the conscious ‘intellectual’ mind. The subconscious mind has a language of its own based on symbols, colours, and sounds.” (p. 25) While learning yoga nidra, one often finds that when images are suggested by the teacher, other distracting images come up. These are from the unconscious, the ego and “they are often the root cause of tension.” (p. 46) By viewing this image in a detached way “as though one were merely watching a movie” the ego will become inactive during the practice and will no longer identify with the attachments, aversions, and inhibitions that produced the secondary images. This is a kind of purging which releases tension.

The primary purpose of yoga nidra is to release tension. Everything we do or don’t do outside our practice creates some kind of tension - mental, muscular, or emotional tension. We often think that relaxing is reclining in a chair or couch with some kind of drug -- coffee, tea, alcohol, nicotine, food -- and watching a screen or reading something. From the yogic perspective, this is merely sensory diversion (that creates more layers of tension) and not relaxation. “For absolute relaxation you must remain aware.” (p.1) Much of our suffering is caused by stress and stress related diseases because we have had no method and no training in real relaxation. Yoga nidra is the method for real relaxation. The final suggested image in the practice is one that induces the experience of calmness and peace.

There is one other critical component to the practice of yoga nidra and that is the resolve (sankalpa in Sanskrit). The resolve is made entirely by you and you bring it to mind at the beginning, right after the initial relaxation by focusing on external sounds, and then again after the final image. The resolve is a short statement which is impressed into the subconscious mind when it is receptive, when you are relaxed and have started to withdraw your senses. The resolve is like a seed that you plant at the beginning of practice and the practice is watering that seed. Statements such as, “I am transformed” or “ I am successful in everything I do” are good examples of the brevity and directness of one’s resolve. The resolve is always present tense.

Like preparing the garden, you must be prepared, receptive in order for your seed or resolve to grow and actualize. The practice of yoga nidra makes you receptive by withdrawing the senses, developing a witnessing attitude, opening the whole mind - subconscious and unconscious, while remaining clear, alert, and aware. “The science of yoga nidra is based on the receptivity of consciousness. When consciousness is operating with the intellect and all the senses, we think we are awake and aware, but the mind is less receptive and more critical.” (p. 29)

True and deep relaxation has the potential to be transformative both in terms of the restorations that can occur and also through the use of specific resolves when the body and mind are at their most receptive. A yoga nidra session lasts between 20 and 40 minutes and can build a foundation of resilience within you. 

Resources

The quotes in this blog are from Swami Satyananda Saraswati’s book Yoga Nidra published by Yoga Publications Trust, Bihar India. 2001-2012.

Richard Miller, PhD.’s book Yoga Nidra is another good resource. It also has audio recordings of yoga nidra practices.

Image credit: By OpenStax College - Anatomy & Physiology, Connexions Web site. http://cnx.org/content/col11496/1.6/, Jun 19, 2013., CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30148008

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Deb McDermott is a first-year student in Yoga Therapy at Prema Yoga Institute. She has been a Yoga teacher for 20 years and recently completed a 40-hour training on Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY) with David Emerson and Jenn Turner.

Yoga for Pitta Season

Do you change your diet in hot, humid weather? What about your sleep? Or how and when you exercise? Summertime, which here in the eastern U.S. means hot, humid weather with lots of sun and light, is also known as “pitta season.” Pitta is one of the three Ayurveda doshas.

Ayurveda is a technology - a skill - that teaches us how to live optimally through creating balance physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually in relation to ourselves and the environment we live in. Ayurveda understands that all things are made of the elements - earth, water, fire, air and space - and that combinations of elements create the doshas. The doshas - vata, pitta, and kapha - are discernable states produced by relationship to the elements, and an expression of the qualities of the elements. Pitta, for example, is made of the elements fire and water, and expresses the qualities of hot, liquid, sharp, light, spreading, and oily.

Cool for the Summer?

Summertime here is hot and humid - the most pitta of all our seasons. The excessive heat and humidity can push us out of balance in a fiery way, and so we need to understand how to pacify pitta to bring us back into balance. Furthermore, people who already have a pitta dominance are more susceptible to pitta imbalance in the summer.

Each of us has aspects of all three doshas in us in differing amounts, and expressed in different ways. For example, I have pitta expression in my body size and facial features, kapha qualities in my sleep, dreams, and emotions, and vata qualities in my taste preferences.

Take this short quiz to determine your constitution of vata, pitta, and kapha. Perhaps more important than your constitution generally, is how you are today, as a result of how you are living and taking care of yourself (called vikruti in Ayurveda). I drink a fair amount of coffee, multi-task, and sometimes don’t sleep enough. These contribute to too much vata in me some days.

This short quiz can also assess your current state. This can help you see ways to live in greater balance.

The Pitta Personality

Pitta shows up as type-A personalities - people who are competitive, intense, driving. Pitta is fiery, hot, driven. For example, Pitta folks love hot yoga and ashtanga. They love challenges and competition. They love to stoke the fire. Stoking the fire too much can lead to burn out, exhaustion, dehydration. This is why balance is important. Ayurveda follows the principle of “like increases like,” so balance is achieved by looking to opposing qualities. To pacify excessive pitta we look to increase the qualities of cool, dark, dry, and soft.

Yoga to Chill Out

July and August weather stokes the fire of pitta, so everyone needs to pacify pitta at least a little bit during the summer months. Those who already are more pitta or live a pitta lifestyle will find more balance and ease by learning how to pacify those fires.

The most important pitta-pacifying yoga you can practice starts with your approach to your practice and each pose. As pitta is driven, competitive, hot and goal-oriented, adopt a curious, explorative mindset to your practice. Do not seek to achieve any pose. Instead, find your edge, then back off 20-25% and to feel a more nurturing, nourishing sensation in the pose. Soften your ujjayi breathing, making it audible only to yourself during your practice. Let go of trying to go deeper or achieve a new pose or new variation of any pose. Instead explore what it takes and what it is like to back off a little, to feel a supportive calming in your body, and to focus your mind on nourishing rather than pushing your body. This might sound a little bit like a yin or restorative yoga class - and both are excellent to practice a few times a week during pitta season. 

Asana “Medicine”

The main sites in the body for the pitta dosha are in the belly - the small intestine and the liver -- so poses that open these areas are pitta-pacifying, while poses that close or contract these areas can aggravate pitta. Pitta-pacifying poses include backbends, while pitta aggravating poses include many forward bends because they can increase heat in the middle of the body. Forward bends are also calming, so do not avoid them all together, just limit them.

Side bending poses and open twists are also helpful in releasing excessive pitta energy in the solar plexus area. While standing poses are generally heating, trikonasa as a side bend is also pitta-pacifying.     

Breath “Medicine”

Cooling breath, as in the pranayama practice of shitali, is also helpful in decreasing heat and pitta. Guided meditation and yoga nidra are also good practices to help cool the fires of pitta during pitta season.

Avoid the sun between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., when it is at its strongest, and avoid working out during the hottest times of the day. If you can, exercise in a cool room without direct sunlight - early morning or late afternoon swimming is great for pacifying pitta. Drink plenty of cool (but not ice cold) water. Pitta-pacifying tastes are sweet, bitter and astringent. Sweet fruits - melons, peaches, cherries, and the like - and cooling vegetables - leafy greens, cucumbers, fresh salads are good choices to bring balance during pitta season. Avoid hot, spicy foods. Moonlight is particularly calming for pitta imbalances, so a leisurely night-time stroll when the moon is out can be nourishing during pitta season.

Care to learn more about Ayurveda?  Our therapeutics courses all refer to the ancient science of Ayurveda, and our Ayurvedic Yoga Therapy Course is offered every year.  For more information, check out our Trainings page.

Image Sources:

Summer city https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/nyc-weather-forecast-sunny-weekend-ahead

Melons https://www.foodnetwork.com/healthyeats/in-season/2017/08/market-watch-melons

Moonlight https://www.pinterest.com/pin/166422148701144089/?autologin=true

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Deb McDermott is a first-year student in Yoga Therapy at Prema Yoga Institute. She has been a Yoga teacher for 20 years and recently completed a 40-hour training on Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY) with David Emerson and Jenn Turner.