How I wake up before 5am every day
without an alarm.

It starts the night before, at 5:30pm with dinner. I'll make something like oven roasted vegetables and chicken, or a potato salad with salmon, just something real and filling. My fiancé and I eat together with no phones and no show running, just catching up on each other's day. That part of the evening honestly matters more than most of what comes after.

After dinner we take our dog to the neighborhood park and always spend a few minutes standing barefoot in the grass. Grounding, so basically direct skin contact with the earth, brings your cortisol down, and for me it's one of the best ways to decompress after a full day of being on my feet or in front of a screen. It sounds like a small thing but it makes a real difference.

When we get home, overhead lights go off and we keep the house dim from this point on. I keep my phone and computer on night mode to cut blue light, and I actually run night mode all day, not just in the evenings, because blue light suppresses melatonin and most people are getting way too much of it from the moment they wake up without even realising it. I also have chamomile tea with magnesium glycinate around this time. It's honestly one of the best things I've found for sleep and taking it in the hour before bed is when it works best. I pair it with the tea so I actually remember.

Red light therapy has made the biggest difference to my sleep quality out of anything I've tried. It supports melatonin production, helps with inflammation, and promotes recovery at a cellular level. I usually do about 10 to 15 minutes while I wind down and it's become one of my favorite parts of the evening.

By 8 it's time for bed. I always shower first because there's something about getting into bed clean that makes falling asleep so much easier. I charge my phone in the kitchen every night so there are no screens in the bedroom at all, and lavender essential oil goes in the diffuser while we wind down. By 8:30 I'm out.