How to finally start waking up early and go to bed on time. Attention Design over Willpower.

Your aspirations to wake up or go to bed on time aren’t failing because you’re “undisciplined” or broken.

Most of the time, your attention is simply getting pulled by whatever is loudest in the moment - the real engine behind the intention-action gap and the knowing-doing gap.

You'll learn about practical, behavior change tools used in coaching and backed by behavioral science, including motivational salience: you don’t do what’s most important to you, you do what you pay attention to.

We talk about designing cues and triggers that make good habits memorable and important enough for you to actually do them.

If you’re trying to improve sleep quality, build a morning routine, stay consistent with mindfulness, or finally become the person who writes and journals, this is a simple framework that will help.

Subscribe for more tools like this, share this with one person who needs it, and leave a review so more people can close the gap and follow through.

Transcript

A Sleep Struggle And A Better Alarm

Why Reminders Change Behavior

Build Cues For Habits That Matter

Motivational Salience And System Design

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hi guys and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Shorina. I'm your host. I'm your partner in change, transformation, and personal and collective evolution, and just someone with a lot, a lot of obsession and passion for learning more about, discovering, developing our human potential to use more of it in our daily lives to create the most extraordinary life experience and more positive impact and wonder in our world. Today, guys, we are talking about one of the most, I don't know, popular or uh relevant to all of us gap, intention, action gap, knowing, doing gap. You know, it's the thing that stands between what we want to have in life and what we end up having, what who we want to become in this life and what we end up doing, which then creates the person and the life that we have. And I want to start with a personal story, a personal experience. For a little bit of time, I was struggling with my sleep time. But actually, before I continue the story, by the end of this podcast, guys, you're gonna learn how to help yourself and other people to close that intention-action gap, knowing and doing gap. So you and people you lead and people you wanna help in this life end up having more often than not the results that they want growing into the person they wanna become, creating the results that they want to have and experiences in the real world, right? So today you're gonna get a tool which is proven or research in behavioral science and used in coaching a lot, like a lot, a lot. It's probably one of the most effective and most used and popular tools in coaching methodologies. So you're gonna get all of this by the end of this podcast to use in your life to become more proficient at closing that gap for yourself and people you lead. So the story for a bit I've been sort of struggling with having consistent sleep time. It's, you know, there was there is always this one more thing, or more to read, more to learn, or something to finish, or something that grabs your attention and takes it away from your sleeping time. That was before one day I decided to follow my own advice and set up an alarm for 8:30 p.m. to get up at my ideal waking up, somewhere between 4 and 4:30 a.m. in the morning to get my day going, because I know that at this time I feel my best when I sleep from about 90 ish or just before 9 to 4, 4-ish. I feel my best, I have the best kind of sleep, it's the deepest, and also the consistency of sleeping time creates even better sleep experience. I recover more and I wake up without alarm and I feel fresh, like in my mind, in my body, and I'm ready to go, right? It's like perfect timing for my biology for whichever reason. And knowing that, I was trying to get to the sleeping time. Um, but there was always, you know, an excuse, a social commitment, again, another thing to learn, another thing to do for my work, or something that grabbed my attention and was more interesting than sleeping in back uh in bed. And but one day I decided, let me follow my own advice that I give to my clients who are struggling to get to bed at a consistent time. And I decided to set up an alarm at 8:30 p.m. And all of a sudden, it actually got pretty easy to go to bed on time. The alarm would go off, and I would close down and sort of wrap up everything that I was busy with, and then start preparing stuff and getting ready for bed, uh, which meant you know doing my uh evening co-washing ritual, doing uh a little bit of meditation, taking a hot shower, uh, doing a little bit of journaling if my mind is really active. And uh it got into a routine and now like it feels like it's pretty solid. Why does it work so well to have a go-to-bed alarm? It's not just that there is an alarm that reminds you that you know you gotta go to bed if you wanna wake up early. It's that it reminds you of your intention. It reminds you of the fact you think, you know, it's your values, it's your goals, and you know what's best for you, and you don't need the alarm to remember that. But actually, that's not how the brain works. Brain's attention is pulled into all the different directions all the time by things in your environment, by your work, by people around you, by social media, by all of these things. And your brain does not have the same level of motivation for even your most core beliefs and your deepest motivations, the things that you say are super important to you, like perhaps your helps, health, and your performance, and because of that, sleep quality. Your brain does not uh is not motivated by the most important things, but by the things that you pay attention to. And things like alarms and all kinds of reminders and triggers and cues done at the right time in the right place, usually when you need to take action, those things remind you of your other motivations or other aspirations that somehow might be at the background, somewhere a little bit behind all of the things that you are busy with at the moment, like perhaps working on something or uh being engaged in some social activity or learning something or again working on something. And those again reminders allow you to pause for a moment and think about hey, I actually do care about my sleep, and I know that it is better for me, and I know that there is morning, and I know that I'm actually fresher in the morning, and I can finish whatever I'm working with in the morning with a much better, clear head, and I'm gonna recover much better. And just, you know, waking up before the rest of the world doesn't feeling my best, it's just freaking amazing. It's an amazing experience that I absolutely cherish, but all of that I forget unless there is something to remind me of that at the right moment, yeah, in the right place. And that's what that alarm does remind me of what's important to me when my mind gets busy with something else. You know, some of those reminders of what's important to us happen automatically, like for example, your hunger when you need to top up your nutrition deposits. Other reminders might be of your work, like you have commitments, you have meetings, you have deadlines, you have projects. Um but it's also very important to design, to manufacture those cues, triggers, and reminders for things that might not come up naturally. Like let's say if you want to do meditation consistently, it's not something that's ever gonna be urgent, but it is proven to help you create more awareness, more mindfulness, more intentionality in your life, and also helps to train your focus so you're not, so your attention is not pulled away into all the different places, not necessarily good for you kind of places. And for meditation, you can put a meditation mat just where, just right where you sleep and roll out of bed, so you start meditating right away instead of thinking, or I should remember about that, or I'm not that motivated, or you never have enough time. Making the time, creating the environment, not relying on your brain to remember it, that's much much, much more effective. Again, proven by neuroscience and coaching results and methodology, way to do the things that your future self is inspired or wants you to do. Or if you want to write every day, putting it into your calendar and treating it like a meeting, and guess what? You will then show up for your writing, and the writing will get done. And the person who you want to become, that the person who thinks deeper, who writes, perhaps becoming a writer or content creator, is gonna be a byproduct of that reminder every day, of that alarm every day, or looking at your calendar and seeing the writing block and actually doing that. Or maybe you want to journal every day. Same thing. Where is the reminder? Where is the slot on your calendar or in your planner? Someone recently, and quite often actually, people ask me when they hear my waking up time. They ask me, How do I start waking up early? I accomplish and feel so much more when I do. Stop trying to win the morning and start managing the night before. Set an alarm to go to bed, I might say. Put your meditation mat next to your bat as a reminder of that you wanted to work on your mindfulness and presence. So you literally step onto your intention when you wake up instead of asking for more motivation later. Block reading or learning time in your calendar, like you'd block a meeting or some social event. Put your writing time in your planner before the day tries to fill that slot. These guys aren't hacks, they're reminders to the future you of what's important. They're the system doing the remembering, so your willpower doesn't have to work that hard. Most of the time, guys, the gap between, and that's what I realized in coaching, have been coaching for 18 years, but sometimes I need that reminder to myself. Most of the time, the gap between what you want to do and what you actually do isn't closed by motivation or willpower commitment or discipline, but by making sure you pay attention to the right thing at the right time. And reminders like my 8:30 p.m. alarm will help you do that. You don't always at all need more discipline. You don't need the world to change to accommodate the things that are good for your future self. You just need the right alarm at the right time to bring your own priorities back into focus. And here I also want you to share something from behavioral science. The motivational silence. Oh, not silence, motivational salience. Forgive my English, English is not my first language if you didn't guess this yet. But motivational salience, a concept from behavioral science. This idea that what drives your behavior in any given moment has to become a center of your attention first. So the idea is that you don't end up doing what's most important to you, you end up doing what you pay attention to. And you can design your environment and cures and triggers and alarms to switch your attention, to focus your attention on what you want your attention to be focused on, to do the thing that you need to do to create the future you and the future life that you want to experience and develop and grow and create more of. Like waking up in our best hour, whatever that best hour for you is. And that usually requires us to go to bed in our best hour. And that is facilitated by alarms a lot better than by trying to willpower or motivate yourself into doing that. And it speaks to the concept, guys, of setting yourself up for success instead of hoping for uh some sort of motivated state that will get you there. While blogging, you know, also AI created this graphic and this sort of concept of high energy you, the system designer, and low energy you, the system executor. And when you are in that state of mind, when you think about the important things in life and self-development, take some time to not just think about what you want to do, but even more importantly, setting up the systems like your alarms or like your fridge for healthy eating, or some sort of accountability system for your low energy, the executor self, to have it easier and most importantly to remember about the right thing at the right time to take the right action. That's it for today, guys. Don't forget to share this episode with at least one other person who might want who might have been spending quite some time wanting to get up at the right time, wanting to go to bed more consistently at the right time. Share this podcast episode with them if you if they are readers, then share my short blog that is linked in the show notes, and reach reviews so this podcast can reach more ears and we can help more people together. And after you finish listening to this podcast, sit down and think about where do you need those right reminders to direct your attention to the things that are important to you so you take the right action and start shaping you and your life experience in the right direction. That's it for today, guys. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you for learning. Until next time, keep listening and keep growing.