Picture it. Your alarm goes off at 6am, and instead of the usual internal argument, you're up. Workout done before the day has had a chance to get in the way. Or you're walking along the beach with a friend, watching the sun come up, the whole day still ahead of you. Or the house is quiet, genuinely, beautifully quiet, and that hour before the kids wake up is entirely yours. Or you’re finally getting started on that side hustle before your main job starts.

Mornings, once you can access them, feel like found time, and it’s a version of the day many people never see.

Especially when you live in a place like Sydney, it seems like everyone is up and attacking the day before it’s even got started.

But as glorious as an early morning seems, for those of us who weren’t blessed with an early disposition, seizing the morning is a hard task to tackle!

When I moved from the UK to Australia, I was thrust into the early mornings and over time, I’ve managed to shift myself into more of a morning person. It’s still a work in progress, but these are some science-backed tips combined with some personal experience to help you become a morning person, even when you really, really aren’t one.

1. Start with the alarm, not the night before

When it comes to an early morning, most people will tell you that waking up early starts the night before—go to bed earlier, no screens, dim lights.

I disagree. To an extent.

If you're not a morning person yet, asking yourself to fall asleep at 9:30pm is asking you to do the hardest thing first.

You can't force yourself to fall asleep. You can lie there in the dark, telling yourself to sleep, and your body will simply ignore you. And there’s a good chance you’ll end up going to sleep even later than you would normally.

But you can force yourself to wake up. That's the lever you actually control.

So start there. Set the alarm, get up, get out.

The tiredness you feel that first day isn't a sign it's not working or that you’re not capable; it's the mechanism starting to tick.

The longer you're awake, the more a chemical called adenosine builds up in your brain. Sleep scientists call this sleep pressure, and it's exactly what it sounds like: a mounting biological drive to sleep that gets harder to ignore the longer you resist it. By the time evening comes around, you'll actually want to go to bed earlier; you won't have to force it. The early wake-up does that work for you.

Which means the night routine, the stuff that makes sleep better and easier, becomes a lot more achievable once you've done this a few times. We'll get to that. But first, get up.

2. Make the First Moment Easier

The hardest part isn't the morning itself. It's the three seconds between the alarm going off and your feet hitting the floor. Here are just a few ways you can avoid hitting the snooze button.

Put your alarm across the room

Once you're vertical and moving to turn it off, the battle is mostly won. The pull of the warm bed is strongest when you're still horizontal. Standing breaks the spell.

Leave your blinds slightly open

Natural light in the last hour before you wake starts easing your body out of deep sleep gradually, rather than yanking you out of it cold. It's a small thing, but it changes the texture of waking up.

Use a sunrise alarm clock

If you wake before the sun does, a sunrise alarm clock is one of the most effective tools to help you wake up. They gradually increase the light in the 20 to 30 minutes before your alarm, mimicking a natural sunrise. Not only does the light help you to wake up rather than the jolt of an alarm, but it’s then harder to fall back asleep again in a lit room.

Plus, getting light in your eyes early is one of the best ways to adjust your circadian rhythm…

3. Hack your Circadian Rhythm

Your circadian rhythm is your body's built-in 24-hour clock. Body temperature, cortisol, melatonin, and a handful of other hormones all rise and fall in a daily cycle, and it's those rhythms that determine when you feel alert, when you feel sleepy, and when you naturally want to wake up.

While the circadian rhythm follows the sun broadly, there's genuine genetic variation in how people's clocks are set. Some people are naturally wired to wake earlier; others later. So if you've never been a morning person, don’t feel bad! It's partly just how you're built.

The good news is that the clock is moveable and you can take actions to shift your circadian rhythm in favor of an early morning.

Get outside straight away

Once you're up, the most powerful thing you can do is get outside within the first 30 to 60 minutes.

Your brain has a master clock that controls your entire circadian rhythm, and it's set primarily by light. Morning sunlight, the kind you get in the first hour or two after sunrise (best to do it as soon as you can), increases your early-day cortisol release, helps regulate your mechanism for when to wake up, and anticipates when to sleep.

Once that fires, everything follows: your alertness, your energy, and the time your body will want to sleep that night.

5-10 minutes is enough. A walk, a coffee on the balcony, standing in the garden.

Even on an overcast day, outside is far brighter than any indoor light. Just increase the amount you’re outside to 15-20 minutes.

And if you can combine it with a workout or a walk with a friend, even better—you're stacking two of the strongest signals your body responds to.

Eat your breakfast

Your gut has its own internal clock, separate from the one in your brain, and when you eat sends timing signals throughout your body.

Eating a real breakfast within the first 30 to 90 minutes of waking tells your metabolism the day has started. Skipping it, or pushing your first meal toward noon, keeps your body in a kind of limbo, awake but not quite switched on.

It doesn't need to be elaborate. Just eat something, especially while the habit is forming.

Move in the morning if you can

Exercise is one of the strongest inputs to your circadian clock. Morning movement reinforces the wake signal and, over time, helps pull your sleep timing earlier.

Late-night training does the opposite; it raises your core temperature and alertness at exactly the point your body is trying to wind down, which makes falling asleep harder and pushes your rhythm later.

Make the weekends work too

Your weekends matter more than people realize. Sleeping in on Saturday and Sunday shifts your body clock, so Monday feels like day one all over again. You don't need to be strict about it, but staying within an hour of your weekday schedule keeps the progress you've made.

4. Now To The Night Before

Once you've done a week or two of early wake-ups and you're starting to feel genuinely tired earlier in the evening, the night-before routine becomes worth building. Not as the starting point, but as the thing that makes everything easier to maintain.

Reduce bright light in the hour before bed

Light suppresses melatonin, the hormone that builds up through the evening and eventually tips you into wanting sleep. Dimming your screens and lights lets that process run on schedule. You'll find yourself actually sleepy at a reasonable hour rather than lying awake staring at the ceiling.

And yes, that means phone light.

Finish dinner two to three hours before bed

A large meal close to bedtime keeps your digestion active and raises your core body temperature, both of which push sleep onset back. A small shift, but a noticeable one.

Keep the bedroom for sleep and keep it cool

The more your brain associates your bed with scrolling or watching TV, the harder it becomes to fall asleep there. That association can be retrained, but you have to actually train it.

Keep your bedroom cool, around 18 to 20 degrees Celsius. Your core temperature naturally drops as you fall asleep, and a cool room supports that.

Pick a rough bedtime and mostly stick to it

If you're up at 6am and need seven or eight hours, you need to be asleep by 10 or 11pm. It doesn't need to be rigid. But it does need to be real.

And the more consistent you are, the more your body starts to do the work for you. Your circadian rhythm doesn't just track when you sleep, it anticipates it.

Over time, your body will begin releasing cortisol, your natural wake hormone, in the lead-up to your usual wake time, so you start to surface from sleep more naturally rather than being dragged out of it by an alarm.

Getting up early stops feeling like something you force, and starts feeling like something your body is already preparing for.

5. Create Momentum

Momentum is something we talk about a lot over on OneCoach (we actually explored that here). But momentum is the thing that drives your journey towards your goals forward.

Every time you wake up, you’re proving to yourself that you’re capable of waking up. And that makes the next one slightly easier.

You’re creating momentum. The more you do it, the more you do it.

So get up early just once. Once is far more manageable than saying you’ll do this for the rest of your life. And then do it again. And again. And again.

• Days one to three are the hardest. You'll be tired and you'll question whether this is worth it.

• By days four to seven, you'll likely notice you're genuinely sleepy earlier in the evening. That's the shift working. Go with it rather than pushing through it.

• By weeks two and three, getting up stops feeling like a battle and starts becoming the default. The rhythm is forming.

• By month two, you might find yourself waking just before the alarm. The quiet of early morning starts to feel like something you've earned, because you have.