How to wake up early, and keep doing it.

Work backwards from 7 hours.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society recommend that adults sleep 7 or more hours a night on a regular basis. If you want to be up at 6am, that means being asleep by 11pm at the latest, which usually means in bed earlier still.

Moving the alarm without moving bedtime does not make you an early riser. It makes you a tired one, and a tired body holds on to sleep harder in the morning.

Move earlier in small steps.

The body clock shifts later more easily than earlier. In classic travel research, people adjusted by about 92 minutes a day after flying west but only about 57 minutes a day after flying east, which is the direction an earlier wake time asks for.

There is no single proven pace. In lab studies, young adults moved their clocks about an hour a day earlier, but only with bright morning light, and in some studies melatonin too. Moving two hours a day was no better. For night owls, the same researchers suggest about half an hour a day. The AASM’s advice for the daylight-saving change is 15 or 20 minutes a night. Slower is easier to keep.

Get bright light soon after you wake.

Light is the main signal that sets the body clock. Light in the late night and early morning moves it earlier, and light in the evening moves it later. The effect is small in dim light and strongest in bright light, such as daylight.

In one experiment, people moving their sleep an hour earlier each day for three days shifted their clocks by 0.6 hours in dim light and by 2.1 hours with continuous bright light. A week of summer camping with only natural light moved people’s clocks about 2 hours earlier, and the night owls moved the most. Go outside or sit by a bright window for your first few minutes.

Dim the last hour of your evening.

Because evening light pushes the clock later, bright rooms and screens late at night work against an early alarm. Lower the lights and keep screens dimmer in the hour before bed.

Keep your times steady through the week.

A National Sleep Foundation expert panel concluded that consistent sleep and wake times are important for health, safety, and performance. In one study of students, irregular sleepers had body clocks running about 2.5 hours later than regular ones.

That does not mean never sleeping in. The same panel notes that catch-up sleep at the weekend may help if your weekday sleep is short. The goal is a wake time that drifts as little as you can manage, not a rule you break every Saturday.

Know whether you are fighting your chronotype.

Some people are genuinely later than others. Chronotype gets later through the teenage years, peaks around age 19, then gets earlier again. Genes play a part, though each person’s genetic push is modest: in a study of almost 700,000 people, those with the most “morning” gene variants slept only about 25 minutes earlier than those with the fewest.

Night owls can shift. In a small trial, 22 night owls followed three weeks of morning light, fixed sleep times, and set meal times, and moved their sleep about 2 hours earlier without losing sleep. Whether that lasts long-term is unknown. If your clock is very late and nothing moves it, read about delayed sleep phase and consider talking to a professional.

Make the first minute automatic.

Even with a well-set clock, the first minutes after waking are foggy, and that is when “ten more minutes” sounds reasonable. Decide the night before what you will do the moment the alarm rings, and make it something that gets you out of bed.

A mission alarm builds that in. Wakr keeps ringing until you complete a task you chose, and two of its missions fit this guide directly: Find bright light stops the alarm when you step into bright light, and Spot the sky stops it when you hold a view of daylight. Both depend on real light, so in winter or before sunrise a bright lamp or a different mission works better. More in how to stop hitting snooze.