How many hours of life do you get by waking up one hour early every day

How many hours of life do you get by waking up one hour early every day?

Some of you have already done this math or even if you haven’t you’ve felt it and discovered the benefits of a longer and more full life waking up early. To make this easy, I’ll start with some assumptions. Trust me, if you go for this short ride reading this you’re gonna like what you discover.

Assumptions:

1. The average, full-time work year is 2,000 hours
2. Average North American life expectancy is 77 years for men and 81 years for women. Let’s call it 80 for easy math.
3. For the sake of this premise I’m referring to waking hours when I speak of living. Yes, rest is essential and critical to brain function and quality of life.

If you start waking up one hour earlier every day when you are 20 years old then you get 365 more hours of living each year.

If you do that for the next 60 years you get (60 x 365) 21,900 extra living hours in your life. Let’s call that 22,000.

22,000 / 2,000 hours in the average work year = 11 work years.

Just by changing your life waking up one hour earlier for the rest of your life you can add an extra ELEVEN YEARS to your life.

And when you do this you’ll soon discover other benefits.

When you wake up early the world is quieter so your mind, creativity, thinking, reading, writing, working, resting, viewing–everything, is easier, more restful, and more productive. These early hours soon become your favorite hours where you will begin to feel that the world is yours. And that beauty and realization are confidence-building and rewarding.

You’ll also discover there’s less traffic when you drive anywhere early in the morning. There are fewer crowds in stores and at almost every business that’s open early. I wish Libraries were 24/7.

I’ve always been a late night and an early morning person. I discovered I prefer the quiet mornings more than the quiet late nights. And I’m much more creative and productive in the early part of the day than I am at night.

Another thing I learned is that my best sleep is between 10pm and 2am when I’m in deep REM. Yes, I get tired almost every day so I set an alarm and take a 15-minute power nap where I actually go so deep in REM that when I wake up I’m disoriented and sometimes don’t know what time it is or where I’m at. THAT is a deep REM sleep POWER nap.

If something wakes me up at night I developed a rule. This rule was very hard to follow at first, even though I enjoy very early mornings. The rule is if I’m woken up and it’s past 3am I stay up and start my day. Ugh. Even if it’s 2:59 when I look at the clock I go back to sleep and wake up when I wake up. I’m odd perhaps, but I’ve never needed an alarm to wake up (unless I was up until 4am doing something). If I set an alarm for 5:00am I will automatically wake up between 4:50 and 4:57 almost every time. Sucks right? No. I like it.

So, when I created the 3:00am wake up rule for me I really never needed to set an alarm because I always wake up early.

Yes, I get tired almost every day so, again, I set an alarm and take a 15-minute power nap when I can.

Also, try to look at the clock as 24 hours instead of 12 hours. I think the 12 hour clock limits human potential and absolutely limits human thinking. If the circular analog clock was divided into 24 hours instead of 12 hours I believe human life and potential would improve

Remember earlier when I stated you get an extra eleven hours of life just by waking up one hour earlier? I wake up two, three, and sometimes four hours earlier than most people. And I try and make sure I get enough rest to offset the extra waking time and to sustain my brain.

Recently I ran across an article about polyphasic sleep. Polyphasic sleeping is where you break up your sleep into multiple smaller sleep segments throughout 24 hours rather than sleeping only at night from five to ten hours. Just like intermittent fasting, there are more than singular approaches to polyphasic sleep. I’ve often thought that if life wasn’t full of so many responsibilities and you could schedule your life the way you want to then you should be able to take advantage of some sort of polyphasic sleeping pattern. Then I read about polyphasic sleep. I’ve not tried it yet, due to my work schedule and three kids, but when I try this I’m going to shoot for that 10p to 2am block with four or more one hour blocks divided throughout the day.[/et_pb_text][et_pb_text disabled_on=”on|on|on” admin_label=”Important Notes – hidden (disabled) to hide from public” _builder_version=”4.19.4″ _module_preset=”default” disabled=”on” global_colors_info=”{}”]Important Notes

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