If you’re looking for some strategies on how to get more energy in the morning, then you’ll love this article.
The alarm goes off. You stare at the ceiling and run the numbers on how late you can leave. Then comes the slow shuffle to the kitchen, where coffee is meant to fix everything and usually doesn’t.
Sound familiar? Morning grogginess is one of the most common complaints there is, and for a long time the standard answer was “go to bed earlier.” Fair enough, but it doesn’t help much at 6:45 a.m.
Sleep scientists, luckily, have spent decades looking at what actually happens in the first hour after you wake up. Some of their findings are obvious once you hear them. Others are a bit surprising (the snooze button, for one, is less of a villain than its reputation suggests). Below are 12 changes you can make, each with the research behind it and one small step to try.
1. Let daylight in before you reach for your phone
In 1938, two researchers from the University of Chicago spent about a month living in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. Nathaniel Kleitman and his graduate student Bruce Richardson wanted to see whether people could train themselves onto a 28-hour day once daylight was out of the picture. The results were split. Richardson, aged 25, adapted. Kleitman, 43, stayed stubbornly on a 24-hour rhythm, according to the US National Park Service’s account of the experiment. What they showed, without quite meaning to, is that the body clock runs on its own logic, and light is the main thing that keeps it in line with the outside world.
Fast forward to 2013. Kenneth Wright and colleagues at the University of Colorado Boulder took eight adults camping in the Rockies for a week, with no flashlights and no phones. In Current Biology, they reported that the campers got about four times more light than they did at home (roughly 4,500 lux on average, against about 980). Their melatonin rhythm moved about two hours earlier. At home, the sleep hormone was still hanging around for a couple of hours after waking. On the camping trip, it had cleared by the end of the night. Eight people is a tiny sample, so treat the exact numbers with caution. The direction of the effect, though, fits with what light is known to do to the body clock.
So the logic goes like this: morning light tells your clock that the day has started, the clock shifts earlier, and over time melatonin clears out before your alarm rather than after it.
Start small: open the curtains as soon as you’re up, and if you can, drink your first glass of water by a window or on a balcony. The phone can wait five minutes. If it’s the scrolling that eats your mornings, these ways to stop doomscrolling are worth a look.
2. Set one alarm, for the time you’ll actually get up
Most of us snooze. In 2025, a team at Mass General Brigham led by Rebecca Robbins analysed around 3 million nights of data from more than 21,000 users of the Sleep Cycle app. The Mass General Brigham snooze study, published in Scientific Reports, found that close to 56% of sleep sessions ended with a snooze. The average snoozer spent about 11 minutes drifting in and out. Heavy snoozers, who hit the button on more than 80% of mornings, lost about 20 minutes a day. Snoozing peaked Monday to Friday and dropped off at weekends, which tells you something about what we’re avoiding.
Why does it matter? The last part of the night is rich in REM sleep, and Robbins’s point is that a run of alarms swaps it for broken, light dozing.
There’s a fair counterpoint. Tina Sundelin and colleagues at Stockholm University published a study in the Journal of Sleep Research in 2023. They surveyed 1,732 adults and then ran a lab test with 31 habitual snoozers. Thirty minutes of snoozing cost them about six minutes of sleep and didn’t harm their thinking right after waking. In some tests it helped a little. Two caveats apply to both studies: one relied on app users, the other on a small lab group, and the Sleep Cycle company supported the first. So snoozing isn’t a disaster. It’s just not a free extra 20 minutes of rest either.
Robbins’s own advice is to “set your alarm for the latest possible time” and get up at the first ring. Tonight, move yours to the minute you really need to rise.
3. Give your brain a soft landing
Even when you get up on time, the first few minutes feel thick. That fog has a name: sleep inertia. In a 2019 review in Nature and Science of Sleep, Cassie Hilditch and Andrew McHill pulled together what’s known about it. Many studies show performance coming back within 15 to 30 minutes, though full recovery can take an hour or more, and longer after a run of short nights.
The mechanism is fairly concrete. Blood flow to the brain stays below its pre-sleep level for up to about 30 minutes after waking. The prefrontal regions, which handle planning and decisions, are among the slowest to recover. Brainwave recordings still show traces of deep-sleep activity for a while. So you’re physically awake before the decision-making parts of your brain have fully clocked in. That’s a causal process, though the researchers are open that parts of it (the role of adenosine, for instance) remain theory.
Think of it like a laptop just after a restart. The screen is on and you can click things, but half the programs are still loading, and anything heavy will crash. The comparison has limits, of course. Your brain has no progress bar, and how long the “loading” takes depends on how much sleep you got. It’s an illustration, not proof. The proof is in the review.
Next time, do this: keep the first 20 minutes for easy, automatic stuff. Showering, making breakfast, getting dressed. Save the tough email or the big decision for later. If the fog comes with a racing mind, a few quick resets for your nervous system can help you start calmer.
4. Drink water before anything else
You go seven or eight hours without a drink every night. That alone doesn’t make you badly dehydrated, but it’s a reason to start the day with water rather than with coffee on an empty tank.
The best-known study here comes from Lawrence Armstrong’s lab at the University of Connecticut. In 2012, in the Journal of Nutrition, his team reported on 25 young women who were mildly dehydrated by about 1.36% of their body mass. That’s roughly the point where thirst first kicks in. They reported lower vigour, more fatigue, poorer concentration and more headaches. Tasks felt harder. Interestingly, most of their actual cognitive scores didn’t drop.
Keep two limits in mind. The dehydration was induced through exercise and, in one condition, a diuretic, which is not the same as waking up after a night’s sleep. And the study was partly funded by a bottled-water company. Still, the gist is plausible and cheap to act on: even mild fluid loss seems to show up first in how energetic you feel.
Give it a go: put a full glass next to your bed tonight, and drink it before your first coffee. It’s one of the simplest good habits to have, and it costs nothing.
5. Wake up at the same time on weekends
A lot of good intentions quietly fall apart at weekends. You get up at 6:30 all week, then sleep until 10 on Saturday, and Monday morning feels like jet lag.
That’s basically what it is. Till Roenneberg and his team at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich coined the term “social jetlag” for the gap between your body clock and your social schedule. Their 2012 paper in Current Biology drew on a database of more than 130,000 people who had filled in the Munich ChronoType Questionnaire. They estimated that about two-thirds of people in Western societies live with a significant mismatch between their internal and social time, and they found that social jetlag was linked to a higher body-mass index. That last finding is correlational: it doesn’t prove that irregular sleep causes weight gain. The broader point holds, though. Every weekend lie-in shifts your clock later, and Monday’s alarm then drags it back.
Your move: pick a wake-up time you can live with seven days a week, and keep weekend variation within an hour or so. Treat it as a promise to yourself rather than a rule, and judge it after a fortnight.
6. Move for ten minutes, even if it’s just the stairs
When you’re tired, exercise is the last thing you feel like doing. Annoyingly, it’s also one of the quickest ways to feel less tired.
Derek Randolph and Patrick O’Connor at the University of Georgia tested this on 18 college women who habitually slept less than 6.5 hours a night. In their 2017 study in Physiology & Behavior, each woman tried three things on different days: a 50 mg caffeine capsule (about a can of soda’s worth), a placebo, and ten minutes of easy stair walking. The stairs won. Participants felt more energetic and vigorous right afterwards, and a little more motivated to work. Caffeine at that dose did very little. Neither option improved memory or attention, and the energy boost from the stairs faded over time, so this is a short-term lift rather than a cure.
Ten minutes of low-intensity movement also happens to fit neatly into the slow first half hour of your day. A brisk walk to the corner shop, a few flights of stairs, some stretching on the living-room floor: pick whatever you’ll actually do, and do it before you sit down at your desk. If you tend to put off anything that feels like effort, these strategies to beat procrastination can help you get going.
7. Work with your body clock, not against it
Some people are simply wired for later hours. Teenagers are the extreme case, and one city ran what amounts to a natural experiment on them.
In autumn 2016, Seattle Public Schools moved the start of all 18 of its high schools from 7:50 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. Researchers from the University of Washington, led by Gideon Dunster and Horacio de la Iglesia, had sophomores at two schools wear activity monitors before and after the change: 92 students in spring 2016 and 88 in 2017. Their 2018 study in Science Advances found a median gain of 34 minutes of sleep on school nights, from about 6 hours 50 minutes to 7 hours 24. Final grades in their biology class rose by 4.5%. At one of the schools, late arrivals and first-period absences fell too.
The study compared two different groups of students rather than following the same ones, and it covered only two schools, so it isn’t the last word. What the case shows is that pushing a late body clock to perform early has a real cost, and giving it a bit of room pays off.
Most adults can’t move their start time by an hour. You can, however, move what you do within it. If your alertness peaks mid-morning, protect that window for your hardest work, and use the early hours for routine tasks. Being in that flow state is much easier when you aren’t fighting your own biology.
A quick experiment: for one week, jot down how alert you feel on a scale of 1 to 10 every two hours. The pattern usually shows up by day four.
8. Drink coffee for the morning, not the night
Coffee is the default fix, and used well it works. The trick is less about how much and more about when.
On quantity, the US Food and Drug Administration’s 2024 consumer guidance says about 400 mg a day, roughly two to three 12-ounce cups, isn’t generally linked to harmful effects for most adults. Sensitivity varies a lot, though, and timing is where people trip up. In a 2013 study in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, Christopher Drake and colleagues at the Henry Ford Sleep Disorders and Research Center gave 12 healthy sleepers 400 mg of caffeine at different times. Taken six hours before bed, it still cut their measured sleep by more than an hour. Most of them didn’t notice. The sample was small, but the finding has held up well enough that the authors suggested avoiding caffeine after 5 p.m.
Picture this, purely as a hypothetical: you have a 4 p.m. coffee to get through a meeting, sleep an hour less than you think, wake up foggier, and reach for an extra cup the next morning. Then you do it again the following afternoon. A neat little loop.
There’s also a morning angle. Hilditch and McHill’s 2019 review notes that caffeine taken after waking can shorten sleep inertia, although it doesn’t take the edge off the first groggy minutes. That makes sense when you know caffeine blocks adenosine, a chemical that builds up the longer you’re awake and pushes you toward sleep.
Here’s a simple way in: have your coffee in the morning and set a personal cut-off at least six hours before bed. Then use that caffeinated window for the tasks on your list that need focus, and organise your day around it.
9. Finish your shower with 30 seconds of cold
This one sounds like something from a wellness influencer, so it’s worth looking at what the research actually shows.
Geert Buijze and colleagues in the Netherlands ran a large randomised trial in 2015. They assigned 3,018 adults aged 18 to 65 to finish their usual hot shower with 30, 60 or 90 seconds of cold water every day for a month, or to carry on as normal. In the Buijze 2016 cold-shower trial, published in PLOS ONE, the cold-shower groups took 29% fewer sick days from work than the control group. The number of days they actually felt ill didn’t change, though. And 30 seconds worked about as well as 90.
The energy part is softer. The paper reports no numbers on energy, but the authors note that the most common benefit participants described was an increase in perceived energy, with many comparing it to caffeine. That’s self-reported and the trial couldn’t be blinded (you know when your shower is cold), so take it as a promising hint rather than a proven effect.
Test it this week: at the end of your normal shower, turn the tap to cold and count to 30. Breathe out slowly while you do it. If you have a heart condition or high blood pressure, check with your doctor first.
10. Choose a breakfast that won’t leave you crashing at 11
Your blood sugar rises after you eat and then comes back down. For some people it doesn’t just come down. It dips below where it started a few hours later. That dip appears to be what sends you looking for snacks mid-morning.
A 2021 study in Nature Metabolism, led by Patrick Wyatt with Ana Valdes of the University of Nottingham, tracked 1,070 people for two weeks with continuous glucose monitors, covering more than 8,000 breakfasts. People whose blood sugar dipped sharply two to four hours after eating reported 9% more hunger, ate their next meal about half an hour sooner, and took in around 75 extra calories in the three to four hours after breakfast. Over the whole day, the extra came to roughly 312 calories. The striking part is that both groups ate the same standardised meals, so the dip was partly down to the individual rather than just the food.
The study looked at hunger and calories, not energy levels as such, so be careful about stretching it. But anyone who has hit an 11 a.m. slump after a sugary breakfast will recognise the pattern. The usual dietary advice of combining carbohydrates with protein, fat and fibre is a reasonable bet for a steadier morning.
Start small: swap one sweet breakfast a week for something like eggs on wholegrain toast or yoghurt with nuts, and notice how you feel at 11. A steadier brain helps with more than energy, too; it’s one of the basics for improving your memory.
11. Protect last night’s sleep, because morning starts there
Every tip above works better on a decent night’s sleep. Without one, they’re damage control.
On 24 March 1989, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. After a 16-month inquiry, the US National Transportation Safety Board concluded in 1990 that one of the probable causes was the failure of a fatigued third mate to manoeuvre the ship properly. The board also found that no rested deck officers were available when the ship left port. It’s an extreme example, but it shows something every tired person knows in a smaller way: a sleep-deprived brain looks awake while making worse calls.
How common is that state? A 2016 CDC report in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, based on 2014 US survey data, found that more than a third of American adults regularly don’t get enough sleep. The benchmark it used, set by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society, is at least seven hours a night for adults aged 18 to 60.
If you’re well under that, no glass of water or cold shower will cover the gap. Work backwards from your fixed wake-up time, count seven and a half hours, and start winding down 30 minutes before that. If you lie there wide awake, try these ways to get to sleep faster.
12. Swap the beep for a melody
What wakes you up may shape how you feel for the first part of the morning.
Stuart McFarlane, a doctoral researcher at RMIT University in Melbourne, studied this with associate professor Adrian Dyer and colleagues. Their 2020 study in PLOS ONE asked 50 people to record the sound that woke them and rate their grogginess against standard sleep inertia measures. Harsh alarm tones were linked to more grogginess, while melodic alarms were linked to less. Dyer’s view, in RMIT’s write-up, is that a harsh “beep beep beep” alarm “might work to disrupt or confuse our brain activity” as we wake. McFarlane also warned that waking badly can affect your work performance for up to four hours. Keep in mind that this was a small online survey: it shows an association, not proof that the melody caused the difference.
It fits with other work, though. Hilditch and McHill’s review mentions that participants’ preferred music improved their performance for up to 20 minutes after waking. And if loud, jarring noise is the backdrop to most of your day, it’s worth reading about how to stop overstimulation before it starts.
Your move: change your alarm to a song or tone with a clear melody, ideally one you like but aren’t sick of yet.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. One late night or a sick kid, and suddenly the new routine has fallen apart. That’s normal, and it matters less than you’d think.
In a study from University College London, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology (online in 2009, in print in 2010), Phillippa Lally and her colleagues followed 96 people trying to build a new daily habit, such as a short run or a piece of fruit at lunch. On average it took 66 days for the behaviour to feel automatic, with a range from 18 to 254 days. The part that matters here: missing a single day didn’t significantly hurt anyone’s progress. What did derail people was being very inconsistent over time.
So one bad morning is just one bad morning. If yesterday went sideways, don’t use it as proof that the plan has failed. Get back to your normal wake-up time the next day rather than sleeping in to “catch up”, because that brings the social jetlag from point 5 right back. If you’re tempted to give yourself a hard time over it, read this on how to stop hating yourself first. And if the whole day has gone wrong, there are ways to turn a bad day around without starting from scratch.
Conclusion
You don’t need all 12 of these. Most people get the biggest return from three: a fixed wake-up time, morning light, and coffee kept to the first half of the day. Add one more once those feel routine, and give each change a few weeks before you decide whether it’s working.
Pick one for tomorrow and set it up tonight, even if it’s only the glass of water by the bed. Then, if you’d like more practical ideas for building days that work for you, browse the rest of our self-improvement guides.
