Waking up is hard. Some days it seems impossible to lift the covers over your head and put your feet on the floor. Whether you’re a full time student or in the workforce, sleep is important to all of us. What may be more important is how you actually start your day. We’ve all had mornings where we’ve slept a full 8 hours, and yet nothing seems to make us feel well rested and ready for the day. Here are four things you can do to curb your cloudy mind and help you feel more energized throughout the day. 

Listen to Music. Waking up and pressing play on a song you love may be second nature for some, but there are benefits to listening to music first thing in the morning besides a catchy chorus. According to researchers from Johns Hopkins University, listening to music in the morning actually improves your brain functionality and “provides a total brain workout.” Listening to music can reduce anxiety, blood pressure, and pain as well as improve sleep quality, mood, mental alertness, and memory. Basically, there aren’t many things that listening to music doesn’t help. 

Diffuse the mood. Certain essential oil scents help your brain in different ways. Citrus helps boost serotonin, peppermint helps your brain become more alert, and cinnamon positively impacts your emotional well-being and productivity. Diffusers are a cheap, easy way to spread the scent of essential oils, and using one in the morning will be extremely beneficial to your mind, body, and soul.

Stop hitting snooze. Hitting the snooze button does not give your brain or body productive sleep, and forcing yourself to wake up over and over again will actually make you feel as if you are losing sleep. You will feel more groggy the more times you hit snooze, because it disrupts your REM cycle and internal clock. The effects of sleep inertia (the groggy, disorienting feeling you get when you first wake up) become more intense if you’re woken up during a deep sleep, which is what your snooze button can do over and over again. The more you snooze, the more groggy you become.

Set your intentions for the day. Using the law of attraction, set goals for yourself. Speak in positive terms, taking any negative words out of your goals for the day. For example, if you want to do well on a test, do not write that you don’t want to fail, write that you want to get a great grade. Eliminating negative thoughts and words in your goals every day will help you focus on the positive in your life, in turn helping you attract more positive outcomes. Writing down these positive goals for yourself will keep you organized, and will ultimately help you achieve them. 

There is no perfect way to wake up, but these methods will definitely help you enjoy the process more. Once you start to wake up feeling energized and ready for the day, it will become less daunting and more fun.