Transcript: What have I learned from figuring out the waking-up strategies of over 250 people? 

And I am talking about people who are not chronic snooze button pushers. But people that get out of bed. And there is a commonality. In the NLP training, we teach a process called TOTE, Test, Operate Test, Exit, and we use eye movements.

I also like to teach the type of questioning required to find out specific details to make the unconscious conscious. So a combination of that, watching eye movements, and asking the right questions in the correct order helps you to figure out how someone uses their brain.

I demonstrate this to my students in the NLP Practitioner class. So there’s an NLP Practitioner and NLP Master Practitioner. I’m in Venice Beach right now – in Los Angeles – where I hold the training on the beach condo three times a year. There’s training in Bali, Mexico, and Amsterdam. What I then demonstrate is a highly unconscious thing to a person. How do they launch from waking up to getting out of bed? And the commonality I found in people is something you could consider doing.

First, a person with an excellent waking-up strategy tends to know how much sleep they need. So they know that it’s challenging to have a good way of waking up if they sleep too few hours. Science has determined that people need about seven to nine hours of sleep to be well rested. It assumes that you have been going to bed on time.

What do people do when they get out of bed? I noticed that their strategy is very small. So a person that lingers in bed goes: “oh my god, I love the blankets,” and “I like to be here and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. ” They start to start to focus on their attention on how nice it is to be in bed and how sleepy they are, how they prefer to be in bed. The chronic snooze button pushing is really about the delay of keeping that pleasure.

A person who’s quickly out of bed has a much smaller process. Though it can differ a little bit, some people have children; some people need to go to the restroom, and a lot of light is coming into the room. One thing that people consistently do is start to imagine what their day would be like if they got up..I’ve noticed that positive people are more likely to get up in the morning and often have a morning routine. They go, ” I want t to get up because then I get to do yoga, or meditation, or NLP, or I get to study, or I don’t have to rush,” and those types of things.

On the flip side, people who are a little bit away-motivated. They’re motivated by a pain impulse. They want to get out of bed because of what happens if they stay in bed. It could be: “if I stay in bed, then my body will be in pain.” Or “if I stay in bed, then I would have to rush,” or “if I stay in bed, people will get angry with me.” Those types of things. There’s a motivation to get out of bed. It’s a very short strategy, that is about the world outside of the bed. That the payoff is to be outside of the bed, rather than focus on the blankets and the warmness of the blankets.

Another thing that I’ve noticed is that because they make it so short, there is very little thinking and time involved, like the 5-second rule. The 5-second rule suggests that you wake up; you immediately get up, so your brain doesn’t start this dialogue that convinces you that it’s okay to stay in bed longer. So that is what I’ve learned from eliciting so many waking-up or getting-out-of-bed strategies over the last gosh 15 years or so.

See you around.

What else do people who quickly get out of bed have in common?

Resources

Book

Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams – Matthew Walker, Ph.D