I woke up at 6:34, a minute before my alarm set at 6:35, as I pretty much always do.
I always wake up before my alarm, even when I worked weird shifts that were constantly changing. My time as a fast food manager had me coming in at 5AM some days, and 4PM others. I remember once I got home and heard my alarm going off, and realized that I had set it for PM instead of AM that day. When I would go to bed, I would see how long I had to sleep, and that’s just how long I would sleep.
I do usually spend about 20 minutes stretching before I attempt to get out of bed, I can’t just leap out of bed like I could in my 20’s.
I used to have severe insomnia, but I learned some tricks to falling asleep. I used to just lay there, trying to clear my mind, and would usually just lay there until I passed out from exhaustion.
The best trick that I’ve learned is, rather than try to clear your mind, to concentrate on something intently. Something boring and mundane, but to focus all of your mental energies on it. The first one I did was a light bulb. I would picture a lightbulb, look at the way it curved around, the way the filament twisted and fit into the socket, even the history and progress of invention behind it. Just everything I could think of about this one singular object. Once all of my mental faculties were devoted to thinking about it, then I would stop thinking about it, and my mind would be clear, and I would fall asleep almost instantly.
I’ve moved on from lightbulbs, and have a wide array of things that I think about when I go to bed. Everything from physics to fantasy, world building, story telling. The important thing is that it is something that doesn’t relate to anything that is actually important, something actually going on in my life, as those are the things that keep spawning new processes, new tangential thoughts, that are hard to just forget about, to stop thinking about.