Wake up early for a productive start to your day

Attention, night owls: Waking up early doesn’t have to be so bad.

While many college students are fans of the late-to-bed, late-to-rise routine, sometimes having morning classes are unavoidable. If you have to be up early, it’s better to embrace the morning than complain and mutter in your seat, or worse, fall asleep.

Laura Vanderkam, a member of USA TODAY’s board of contributors and author of a new e-book, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, points out that exercising, meditating or praying, doing work and eating breakfast are activities that many successful people check off their list in the morning. Tackling these four things in the a.m. can also translate into success for college students.

• Exercise: If you’re going to work out, go in the morning when the gym is less crowded and you don’t have to fight your way to the treadmill. This will consequently lead to a nice morning shower (sorry, nighttime cleansers), which adds another refreshing event to your morning.

• Meditate or pray: Start your day with a clear head and a stress-free attitude.

• Work: Even if you're not a fan of waking up early to do extra work or studying, give it a try. If you’re self-disciplined in the morning, you might work more efficiently as the day progresses.

• Breakfast: Try something more than a power bar. Make yourself some eggs, pour yourself a cup of OJ and watch a Saved By The Bell re-run. It’ll do your body good.

Vanderkam said in the USA TODAY article that as the day progresses, motivation slowly fades; starting on the right foot can help build momentum strong enough to carry you through the rest of the day.

Divya Malkani, an advertising major and rising junior at Syracuse University, said she is a fan of getting up extra early if she has a big day ahead, like mornings when she has a heavily-weighted exam in her first class.

Getting up about two hours early on such mornings, she likes to do a little studying, eat a good breakfast and allow herself to get to a higher level of functionality.

“If I wake up a half hour before, I feel like my brain isn’t working yet,” she said. “Breakfast definitely helps. It gets your system going.”

This summer, Malkani has been taking classes at the University of Maryland. For her most recent statistics test, she woke up and practiced one of every kind of problem to ensure she was prepared for all of the material that the test would cover.

“I just think better in the morning,” she said.

Allie Caren is a Summer 2012 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.