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.
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!
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"."
Back To School: Yoga To Increase Memory and Focus
In yogic philosophy, a sankalpa is a solemn vow, made in the heart and forged by the will. A yogi sets a sankalpa to focus the mind and heart on a particular goal. Like much of Hindu philosophy, the idea of sankalpa is complex and layered, but the Western practice of conscious intention-setting that has gained popularity in the past few decades could be considered a simplified conception of sankalpa, with the caveat that a sankalpa is meditative and process-oriented. When you set a sankalpa, the effort you make towards your goal is as important as achieving it.
In yogic philosophy, a sankalpa is a solemn vow, made in the heart and forged by the will. A yogi sets a sankalpa to focus the mind and heart on a particular goal. Like much of Hindu philosophy, the idea of sankalpa is complex and layered, but the Western practice of conscious intention-setting that has gained popularity in the past few decades could be considered a simplified conception of sankalpa, with the caveat that a sankalpa is meditative and process-oriented. When you set a sankalpa, the effort you make towards your goal is as important as achieving it.
The beginning of a new year seems like the natural time to set a sankalpa, so why am I speaking about sankalpa in September? Good question. The world runs on a wonderfully varied collection of calendars. While most of us follow the Gregorian calendar in secular life, some of us also follow an additional cultural or religious calendar, and may find ourselves ringing in the new year twice. The Chinese New Year generally arrives in February, while many Pagans welcome a new year on November 1st. For Roman Catholics, the liturgical year resets at the end of November with the advent of, well, Advent. Many cultures observe a new year in the spring, which makes sense: as the earth literally renews itself, our communal measure of time does, as well. But if you’re like me, there is one time of year that is indisputably “sankalpa season”—a few short weeks that make me eager for change in a way that no calendar-official new year can, and that time is back-to-school.
It’s been decades since I’ve actually returned to school at the end of the summer, but the early weeks of September still feel full of anticipation and promise for me in a way that January just can’t match. An unofficial straw poll among my yogi friends reveals that most of us get the urge to shop for unnecessary school supplies around this time each year. If Reddit’s discussion forums are any indication, acute back-to-school nostalgia is a bona fide seasonal malady; the aspect of school that adults seem to miss the most is the feeling of working steadily towards a concrete goal, and I get it. As T.K.V. Desikachar says in The Heart of Yoga, “Taking an intelligent approach means working toward your goal step by step.” Perhaps the most enriching part of my yoga therapy journey so far has been the luxury of being a student again, and the satisfaction of vinyasa krama: learning via an organic, stepwise progression based on me, rather than learning as fast as I can to solve a problem or produce a result, as I do in my work life.
So I encourage you to reclaim this back-to-school season for yourself: one of yoga’s great charms is that there is always, always more to learn. This fall, give yourself the gift of a sankalpa: set an intention to broaden your yogic knowledge and fulfill it. And whether you find yourself with a pen in your hand or a foot behind your head, keep in mind these facts about how your asana and meditation practices help you learn, both on the mat and off.
1. Meditation Can Increase Your Ability to Focus, Even If You’re Anxious
Life is fraught with stress already, and the challenge of learning something new can aggravate our body’s stress response, especially if we’re experiencing a doshic imbalance, or have a predisposition towards anxiety (remember: fall is Vata season). According to research performed at the University of Waterloo, just ten minutes of mindfulness meditation every day can result in meaningful improvements in focused attention, especially among those with a tendency towards anxiety. Mengran Xu, a Ph.D. candidate who conducted the study, noted that
"Mind wandering accounts for nearly half of any person's daily stream of consciousness...for people with anxiety, repetitive off-task thoughts can negatively affect their ability to learn, to complete tasks, or even function safely.”
Unsurprisingly, given that the purpose of mindfulness meditation is to notice our thoughts without attaching to them, Xu’s study demonstrates that daily mindfulness meditation helped anxious individuals divert their attention away from their mental chatter to better focus on the task at hand. (Xu might not have been previously familiar with sutra 1.2, “Yogas chitta vritti nirodha,” but he certainly demonstrated it!). In addition, the down-regulating effects that meditation and restorative yoga have on the parasympathetic nervous symptom contribute to stress reduction, which in turn increases cognitive function.
2. Hatha Yoga Can Improve Your Memory
According to research published in The Journals of Gerontology, practicing Hatha yoga can improve your ability to sustain attention, which in turn improves your brain’s ability to recall information.
In addition to recall, those participants in the cited study at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana who spent eight weeks taking regular Hatha yoga classes subsequently showed marked improvement in mental flexibility and task-switching, significantly outperforming a control group who performed non-yoga toning and stretching exercises for the same period.
The likely key to the difference in performance won’t come as a surprise to yogis: breath. According to Neha Gothe, who led the study,
"Hatha yoga requires focused effort in moving through the poses, controlling the body and breathing at a steady rate. It is possible that this focus on one's body, mind and breath during yoga practice may have generalized to situations outside of the yoga classes, resulting in an improved ability to sustain attention."
In other words, dharana and drishti on the mat lead to concentration and focus off the mat, which sharpens your memory. This is excellent news, whether your sankalpa is to master the Sanskrit alphabet or the consistent location of your phone.
3. Yoga Is (Much) Better for Your Brain than Aerobic Exericse
Exercise has long been touted as beneficial for neurological and mental health. But not all exercise is equally helpful. In fact, when it comes to brain benefits, studies suggest that yoga isn’t simply superior to aerobic exercise, it’s in an entirely different league.
According to research reported in The Telegraph, participants who practiced twenty minutes of Hatha yoga demonstrated more gains in reaction time and accuracy on cognitive tests—including the ability to “focus their mental resources, process information quickly and more accurately and also learn, hold and update pieces of information”—than after performing an equivalent amount of aerobic exercise (jogging on a treadmill). Moreover, unlike the post-yoga testing, the post-treadmill testing showed “no significant improvements in working memory and inhibitory control scores.” In other words, not only will you learn faster and retain information longer because of your yoga practice, you’ll remember to raise your hand before you speak, and you’ll be less likely to pass notes in class!
Considering all the ways your yoga and meditation practice boost your learning capacity, you’d be foolish not to take advantage of “sankalpa season” and resolve to learn something new this fall. Ayurveda, Anatomy, Philosophy, specialized yoga, such as pre-natal or trauma-informed: the possibilities are almost endless. I’m so excited for you, I’m mentally packing you a sattvic lunchbox already! Just remember, what’s true on the mat is true in the classroom as well: the effort you expend is as important—if not more so—than your goal.
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A sankalpa is the first step in the deep meditation known as yoga nidra, or yogic sleep. More information on yoga nidra can be found here.
Online Sources
The Journals of Gerontology, Series A
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Molly Goforth is a yoga and meditation teacher and a student at Prema Yoga Institute. She specializes in accessibility and trauma-informed yoga teaching and practice.
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.
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.