The process that helps me (willingly) wake up at 3:30 every morning

What I've learned: Make rituals, not resolutions.

Resolutions fail for most people, but fail ridiculously hard for those with ADHD because we are unbelievably adept at convincing ourselves of anything, including talking ourselves out of things that we know we should do. Resolutions are flaky. They’re little shacks we build in our mind that can be knocked over by the slightest breeze, and usually are. 

But rituals—rituals are a completely different animal. If a resolution is a shack, a ritual is a solid six-story building, built with a concrete center core that extends fifteen feet into the ground, with cement and rebar supports through the entire facility. It’s fireproof, waterproof, and has a security system second to none. 

So we need to focus on creating rituals. How do we do it? It’s a process—and not one that comes easily. It takes work, determination, focus, and repetition. You need to know that you’re going to fail on occasion. But the end result is worth it, and the trick is to constantly focus on both how you feel when you do it and how you feel when you don’t. 

Let’s create a ritual:

Say you want to get up earlier than you currently do. Instead of saying “Tomorrow, I’m going to start getting up earlier than I normally do” (which we know won’t happen), you need to focus on deconstructing the ritual and building it from scratch, one piece at a time.

To build the ritual, I first focus on the reason I want to create the ritual in the first place. For me and my ADHD brain, if I have a reason for wanting to make the change, I have something to which I can refer when I’m putting the steps in place to make the ritual happen. 

So instead of telling myself, “I want to get up earlier so I can do X, Y, and Z,” I start with this: “I want to repeat the feeling I get when I have a truly productive day.” So all of a sudden, my ritual isn’t about waking up early, it’s about chasing the awesome feeling I get when I’ve accomplished a ton more stuff than I normally do. I feel productive, I feel empowered, and I feel “complete.” 

It’s a lot easier to create a ritual for yourself if you take the crappy parts out of the equation. I wake up, on average, between 3:30 and 4:00 each morning. When I tell people that, all they focus on is the time. They can’t comprehend why I do what I do, because all they see is this: “Three-thirty a.m.! That’s horrible! What are you, a farmer?” 

They’re not looking at it like we do: I don’t think about waking up at 3:30 a.m., because that’s not the end goal for me. The end goal is how I’m going to feel when I go to bed at night: happy, productive, and complete. I’m chasing the positive high, not the negative. 

Of course you’re going to fail at your ritual if in your head your ritual sucks! Stop focusing on the negative, and start thinking about the positives! I honestly don’t even think about the time I get up anymore, it’s simply second nature to me. 

So Rule A in creating a ritual: The ritual has to come from a positive place. 

Rule B in creating a ritual: Continue to work backward from the reward. 

For me, the reward of getting up early is that I have a great feeling at the end the day. I’ve had time to do what I wanted to do, I wasn’t rushed, I got to the gym, I got my work done, I’ve been useful. And when it comes time to go to sleep, I’m exhausted in a great way. 

So continuing to work backward from the reward to the ritual, you know that if you want to have that productive feeling, you need to wake up early, which means you need to go to sleep earlier than you were used to, which means you need to prioritize your time. It also means you’ll probably have to give something up. For me, there was at least an hour before I fell asleep, but after I got into bed, that escaped each night into the ether. Whether I was on my phone, or browsing Facebook, or watching TV, I’d get into bed, but not fall asleep for at least an hour. Come morning, that hour came back to bite me. So I prioritized and determined what I didn’t need. Now when I get into bed, the TV stays off, the devices get shut down, and I close my eyes and fall asleep. End result? I worked backward to determine where I could plant the foundation of my ritual and build a much stronger building, instead of a flimsy shack. 

To put it another way, if you want something you’ve never had, you have to do something you’ve never done. So you have to change it up. And to get up earlier, that means going to sleep earlier. Why? Because the reward is worth it. 

Rule C in creating a ritual: Build fail--safes. Fail-safes are exactly what they sound like: if A doesn’t happen, B kicks in to fix A. For the first few weeks, no matter how much sleep I got, my alarm going off at 3:30 a.m. was quite the jolt, and instinctively, I would want to pound the hell out of my snooze bar. But I knew that’s what I’d want to do, so I put fail-safes in place. 

I went out and bought a new Sylvania connected light bulb. It’s technically a bulb that has Wi-Fi built into it. Connect it to your network, and it can be controlled by an app and programmed to do certain things. Like turn on slowly and light up a room at 3:28 in the morning, for instance. So when my alarm went off at 3:30 a.m., and I opened my eyes and the entire room was awash in light, well, that made it just that much harder to go back to bed. It was a fail-safe for my ritual. The beauty of this fail-safe is that once I got used to it, I couldn’t imagine waking up without the lights on! It acts as a backup on the off chance that the alarm doesn’t work, and my body is programmed now to expect light when I wake up. It makes it that much easier.

Finally, Rule D for setting up a ritual: Visualize yourself achieving what you were going for with the ritual in the first place. We all know the power of positive thinking, and how that can work to our advantage. There’s a reason coaches give their teams “pep talks,” and not “defeat talks.” So when you fall asleep, and the second that alarm goes off, think about what you’re going to get out of it. 

I’ve been doing the super-early thing for years, and I can tell you that I still, from time to time, have to remind myself what I’ll be giving up if I don’t get out of bed. And yes, every once in a long while, it doesn’t work, and I fall back asleep, and I suffer the consequences. But each time I do, I get a reminder of why I do what I do, and the times I fail become fewer and fewer. Do this for three to four weeks, and guess what? You’ve created a ritual! 

Rituals are the Holy Grail for those with ADHD. And my goal in explaining why rituals are so important is simply this: if you’ve ever looked at a successful person and said, “I wish I could be like that,” rituals can help you get there. Once you’ve tasted the benefit of a ritual (whether it’s being more productive, eating healthier, or whatever goal you have for yourself), your brain remembers that feeling and you want more of it. Building a ritual to make getting that feeling easier and more frequently is a good thing, possibly the best of things.

This article is adapted from Faster Than Normal: Turbocharge Your Focus, Productivity, and Success with the Secrets of the ADHD Brain by Peter Shankman, published by TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright ? 2017 by Peter Shankman.