Having your first 8 a.m. class on your schedule can be very daunting and intimidating at first. Even if you’re a war-hardened veteran upperclassman with multiple 8 a.m.’s under your belt, there are always tips and tricks you can learn along the way to make those early classes more bearable.
#1 Set Multiple Alarms in the Morning
You obviously will need to set an alarm to get up in the morning, but the important thing here is to remember to set several, that way in case you sleep through one, you still have others to wake you up. Tyler Thornton, a junior at SNU, suggested, “Make sure to set a loud alarm that you know will get you up. And place the alarm across the room where you know you’ll have to get up in order to turn it off.”
#2 Change Your Attitude
You know you have to get up in the morning and go to class, so get over it. Dragging yourself into class complaining about what time it is does not do anything to help. This doesn’t mean it suddenly needs to become your favorite class, but at least change your attitude about it. You will be impressed at the huge difference it makes just to come into class with a positive mindset.
#3 Get a Good Amount of Sleep
Most of the time, people hate 8 a.m. classes not necessarily just because they happen to be early in the morning, but because they stay up late the night before and therefore don’t get near as much sleep as they would like to. If you know you have an 8 a.m. in the morning, then start trying to go to bed earlier than you normally would-even if that means setting an actual “bedtime” that you try to be in bed by. Think about how much enjoyable and tolerable your 8 a.m. class would be if you had gotten a full 8 hours of sleep before had. Look at what is keeping you up late at night, and see if it is really worth missing those precious hours of sleep you could be getting.
#4 Get in a Routine
Junior Luke McGrath said one of the best ways that help prepare him for his 8 a.m. classes is getting a routine. “Have some kind of your own personal wake-up routine, whether it be exercise, reading, coffee or taking a shower. Just anything that helps wakes you up.” Having your own personal routine in the morning to get up to is much better than waking up just minutes before the class starts and scrambling to figure out what you need to do.
Got any tips of your own about how to survive 8 a.m. classes? Leave ideas in the comment section below.
[author image=”http://echo.snu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/JonathanHane.jpg”] Jonathan Hane, Staff Contributor
Jonathan Hane is a junior at Southern Nazarene University. Growing up overseas, Jonathan still struggles with counting American change and would much prefer a large bowl of rice over a sandwich at Chick-fil-a. He is currently studying Mass Communication and hopes to move back overseas to travel after graduation while doing photojournalism for missions and humanitarian aid organizations. [/author]