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The 5 A.M. Revolution

Author -> Dan Luca

This book is made up of four main parts :
  1. Time tested strategies and conditions to get the best sleep possible
  2. It is about the morning ritual.
  3. it is about waking up at 5 a.m. and reasons to do that
  4. It is an 8 week system on how you can slowly begin to wake early

Chapter 1: Getting the best sleep

  • A. The perfect bedroom for a good night’s sleep

    Room design for better sleep

    • When you walk into your bedroom, it should make you feel relaxed and peaceful
    • Taking care of the sleep environment and thinking about how it looks and feels is very important
    • Start by decluttering your room and creating a clean and soothing place.
    • Try to take computers and electronics out of the bedroom, or at least out of the bed. The only thing you should be doing on the bed is sleep!

    • If you want to improve sleep quality you should take care of the following elements:

    • Darkness

      • We all have a biological clock within us, we tend to feel more sleepy when it gets dark in our surroundings.
      • Sleeping in complete darkness results in a far better quality of sleep as darkness is proportional to the amount of melatonin released.
    • Noises
      • While you sleep, your brain is listening to the sounds outside at a basic level.
      • Noise can cause disturbance in light sleep and thus stop you from entering the deep sleep phase.
      • Noise can even harm your hearts by elevating stress hormones.
    • temperature
      • The ideal sleeping temperature is 16-20 degrees
      • When we are going to sleep, our body drops it’s temperature so that we can sleep faster, this is why eating a huge meal or exercising before going to sleep is a bad idea.

    • B. Daytime habits for better sleep

    • Get 30 mins of sunlight in the morning

      • helps in regulating the biological clock, and sleeping at night
    • Drink enough water
    • Exercise for 30 minutes
      • Exercising makes sleeping easy
      • People in good shape need less sleep

What to avoid during day and evening

  • No caffeine after 3 P.M

  • No alcohol after 3 P.M

  • No smoking after 7 P.M

  • No screen time after 8 P.M.

  • C. Evening routine

    • Have an alarm to stop using the electronic devices
    • Have a goto bed alarm

    Steps:

    1. Review of the day - 10min
    2. Clothes for tomorrow - five minutes
    3. Brush teeth - five minutes
    4. Prayer and meditation - 5 minutes

Chapter 2: The Morning Ritual

There are a lot of things to be done in the morning ritual such as cold/warm showers, meditation, goal setting, but I am picking the few which I think can help everyone and are feasible for everyone.

  1. Gratitude
    • It is being thankful to anything and everything you can be thankful to
    • Gratitude has the benefit of releasing the hormone oxytocin which counters any hormones that get released due to anxiety,
    • Best place to do this : While brushing your teeth is the best time for this
  2. Journaling
    • It’s the easiest way for staying connected to yourself
    • All the resources you need to become better are within you, all you need to do is find them!
  3. Only one
    • It’s an extreme method of prioritizing the schedule of a busy person.
    • Instead of working on lots of small pieces and many projects at the same time, work on just one piece of the most important project of that particular day.

Chapter 3: The 5 A.M. Revolution

Before we get into how to wake up at 5 AM.

It’s important to know why.

Reasons to wake at 5 A.M.

  1. the opportunity to spend quality time with yourself;
  2. Nobody’s awake at that time to bother you with phone calls, emails, texts, etc.
  3. You go out for a run without being disturbed by traffic
  4. You can plan your priorities and this makes it easier for you to say ‘no’ when your coworkers, boss or friends demand unreasonable things from you.
  5. You meditate in silence and solitude for five to 10 minutes, focusing on your breathing. This allows you to feel calm and relaxed.
  6. You exercise and boost your metabolism.
  7. You eliminate 95 per cent of the stress you’re dealing with right now.
  8. You claim your power back, the power you conceded to external circumstances, thus becoming a centered, balanced and harmonious person who achieves everything he/she sets out to do because you have already solved your internal conflicts…the only ones that are truly relevant.

The Wake Up partner

  • One of the most important ways to make sure you are consistent with your purpose, which also works for waking up early, is by Having a wake-up partner!
  • Find someone who will have your back when you need them, and be there for them!

What to do when you miss a day?

  • It’s very important that you come up with a plan that includes what you’re going to do when, for various reasons, you end up skipping a day out of your schedule.
  • There are three things you should do if you end up missing a day
    1. Forgive yourself! Forgive yourself for not being ‘perfect’ because nobody is.
    2. Get back on the horse as fast as you can! Restart the sequence of ‘good’ days—days when you’ve practised the selected habit—as soon as possible.
    3. Step 3: Measure your progress to eliminate regret over a lack of perfection. You can use your growth and development as a source of motivation or you can keep being the prisoner of your frustrations, consuming the energy that could help you reach your destination.

Why is it important to follow this process?

  • Small setbacks are almost unavoidable and herein lies the trap most people fall prey to as they plan to implement productive habits.
  • These people have a ‘perfect streak’ for a few days and afterwards they have a day when they don’t practise their habit at all.
  • After a single missed day, your engine hasn’t stopped yet but after two or more unsuccessful days, it’s as if you had stopped the engine.

The 8 week system

This part of the book basically tells the reader how they can implement the 5 am schedule in their life slowly and subtly.

It has rituals to be done for 8 weeks, changing your bed time slowly.

The key takeaways from here are:

  1. Take 10 mins off from your wakeup time every week till you hit the time you want to wake up at
  2. Drink a glass of water as the first thing after you wake up
  3. Have a nutritious breakfast in the morning
  4. Try to do meditation for 5 minutes
  5. Decide the tasks for today using OnlyOne technique.