I would love to increase my early morning (~5AM to 7AM) productivity. However, my thinking is relatively sluggish in the hour up to two post waking up. Do you have any tips on how to shorten that period of natural sleep inertia that occurs when you wake up early? To let you know, I currently take a cold shower and drink bulletproof coffee.
First, catch up on all your sleep. Then start going to bed at 9:30pm or so. You’ll probably start waking up naturally, fully rested, at 5-6am. (Note that this is also easiest to do at times of year when the sun rises at 5-6am.)<p>The natural and fully rested wake up will leave you quite alert.
Don't drink coffee. I'm much more functional in the mornings since giving up caffeine. The mechanism by which your body acclimatises to a new baseline of caffeine is known -- you're inflicting those hard mornings on yourself. (And if you're not going to be correspondingly earlier in the night -- consider giving your brain the sleep it is telling you it needs. There's little to no evidence that you can train your mind to be high-performing while short-changing it on sleep. On the contrary, plenty of evidence exists that you perform worse when you under-sleep, but you also lose the ability to notice you're performing worse. Your sleep dep is moving you to a worse place in Dunning-Kruger space)