I’m surprised nobody has suggested this, but…
…IF you like coffee, get a coffee maker with a timer and set it to commence brewing about fifteen minutes before your wakeup time. The scent of well-brewed coffee is one that will help motivate you to at least get into the kitchen.
Being a college student myself I’ll agree with the fact that it is hard to find the appropriate amount of sleep sometimes. I have a terrible tendency to delay going to bed. I have always had a history of going to sleep and I am never really willing to unless I am very tired. For this reason I’ll often stay up later than I should on the internet, or watching TV or partying or whatever. The idea about getting enough sleep is a good one and can make a difference in getting out of bed, but the truth is that after a cup of coffee you are completely awake and it was only an uncomfortable 10 minutes at the most. So if you don’t have much time you just have to figure a way to get through these 15 minutes. Having a schedule as a college student is hard because part of what make college so much fun is that there really isn’t much scheduling going on. Your classes probably don’t start at the same time of the morning in the first place and then you won’t be doing the same thing every night either. The full bladder thing doesn’t work for me because I don’t really feel the urge unless I have managed to get up.
I highly urge a cup of coffee, and if I had a coffeemaker like that, then I’d use it. Those things are nice. I do have a little bit of a routine, though. Call it my one hour-routine. Ever since I have had to get up by myself, I have always had one hour from when I needed to leave the house from when I woke up. This would leave about 30 minutes or less for eating and generally enjoying my coffee/breakfast. I would highly recommend a bowl of cereal or poptarts/toaster strudels. They are slightly enticing. Defenitley don’t do the just in time wakeup because that doesn’t really work well. I do like the idea turning on the news in the morning, it sounds like it would arrouse my interest. I turn on the TV sometimes it seems to help.
A word about alcohol. I can usually survive a 6 hour sleeping day if I haven’t been to a party. But if you add alcohol you need to have more time to recuperate. Drink lots of water before going to bed.
Another solution you may want to try is to take a caffiene pill like nodoz or something. You could do this about 30 minutes before you wake up normally on particularly bad days. As an example you could wake up 30 minutes before and see how tired you are, if you feel like sleeping another 4 hours then take a nodoz. If you feel ok then don’t. I have never tried this and would think of doing it if I didn’t drink coffee. You only have to be awake for one second and then you get to “sleep” again, but probably not very long. And when it does start to kick in you won’t care that you can’t sleep anymore.
I too am a University student, and I’ve been guilty of the just-in-time wake-up for years now. I agree that its a miserable way to do it, but I don’t know any better way. I find I have the opposite attitude to many of the posters here: The thought of having “stuff to do” in the morning just makes me NOT want to get up. Its a lot easier to just hop out of bed…and leave…then it is to hop out of bed and mull around doing this and that for half an hour (ie, it represents additional time I could be sleeping).
Another difference with me is that I prefer to wake up to music I actually like. That way I can sort of lay in bed and “enjoy” the morning wake-up. Also, a warm room is a must. There’s no worse demotivator than having to get out of a nice warm bed into a cold room.
I never really need to get up early these days (I am caring for my parents) but there will come a time when I probably will have to get up before 10 am - and I intend to get a timer thing that you plug into an electrical socket and plug a lamp into that set to swtich on 30 minutes before I want to get up. If I need to get up early (like to take one of my parents to an appointment at the hospital) I set my mobile (cell) phone alarm. My new phone lets you choose what sound it makes when the alarm goes off, so I’et set mine to play LaBamba and the volume is set on the “increase” setting (so it starts off quiet and gets louder)
I think it’s been said already, but: Just get up.
I lie to myself. I say, “Just stand up and take 3 steps toward the bedroom door…you’re not realy getting up.” I fall for this every time and by the time I figure out I’ve been tricked I’m usually in the shower or at least awake enough to not want to throttle the part of me that got me out of bed…he was just doing his job.
I find it helpful to put the alarm on at least half an hour before you need to start getting ready. You wake up, and you have half an hour to get yourself out of bed.
I’ve been employing this method with a decent success rate this year at University. The alarm goes off every ten minutes after hitting the snooze, so after three snoozes I’ve resigned myself to being awake, and enjoyed a little bit of warm bed time.
In the summer, the hungry cat method works like a charm. Works a little too well. They both know their dishes are only going to be filled once, and it comes in the morning. She’s a soprano and he’s a baritone, so the mew/MOW morning chorus is quite musical.
Try getting up twice. Seriously, it works for me. I have to leave the house at 6:30 every morning. I have two alarms set, one at 5:10 and another at 6:10. First, I wake up at 5:10 and take a shower. Then I get back in bed (yes, the same dirty bed I just go out of). I then get up again at 6:10, get ready, and leave for work.
I used to have an incredibly hard time getting out of bed, no matter what. It’s been like that for 20 years. Then one morning, I had the idea for this method and I tried it. It really seems to work for me. It makes it easer for me because when I get up the first time, it’s easy since I know I will be able to get back in bed after the shower. When the second alarm goes off, I’m already mostly awake and it’s pretty easy then. Plus, I’ve had a nap. Sometimes I don’t even go back to bed the second time.