Everyone is aware of the famous quote by Benjamin Franklin, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

However a lot of people struggle with rising up early due to a lot of reasons and habits. But as Leo Babauta writes “Waking early can give you an hour or three of extra time for focus and creativity.” Waking up early has a lot advantages and if you look at the life of successful and productive entrepreneurs, you will see one common habit, they are all early risers.

Here are a few tips to help you in becoming a morning person:

1. Have a Strong Reason to Wake Up Early

Unless you have a purpose to wake up early, you will not be able to convince yourself to become an early riser. As Celestine Chua puts it, “Almost all attempts to wake up early fail because there isn’t a strong enough reason driving this habit change”. So before you try to change your routine make sure you have a strong reason that you are convinced on 100%.

2. Make Gradual Lifestyle Changes

In order to be able to train your body to go to bed early and rise early too, it is important that you make gradual changes to your routine rather than trying to wake up at 5AM or 6AM after sleeping at 2AM or 3AM. This would also be extremely helpful if you are a night owl used to sleeping at 8AM and then waking up in the evening.

As Charlie Mendoza suggests, “Do it in increments, so instead of sleeping at the same time, say 8 AM, sleep 15 minutes earlier and wake up 15 minutes earlier ….. If you do this continuously, you’ll be a morning person in less than a month.”

3. Do not Hit Snooze

As Jeff Goins mentions in his article, “Hitting your alarm’s snooze button doesn’t give you more of the restful REM sleep. Your body and mind aren’t recuperating you’re just wasting time.”

In fact if you are in a habit of hitting snooze regularly your mind will become used to ignoring the alarm. It is a good idea to keep your alarm across the room so that you have to get up to turn it off. This way you will have to get out off bed and there will be no urge to hit the snooze button.

4. Create an appealing early-morning routine.

Create a morning routine that gets you excited. It could be few minutes of meditation or a hot cup of coffee or some other activity that gets you motivated. As per Katherine Martinko, “Easing gently into the day makes it a lot easier to get up, rather than leaping into jogging clothes and hitting the empty streets for an early morning run (although that might work for some highly energetic individuals!).”

5. Get Enough Sleep

Although everyone’s sleep requirement is different from each other, but generally a person needs to get at least 6-8 hours of sleep. Another important factor is to get quality sleep rather than focusing on quantity. The better your sleep quality is the easier it will be for you to wake up early and not feel tired or fatigued. (Peter Clemens)