I hate mornings.

Actually, that’s not quite accurate. I don’t mind mornings in and of themselves, and in fact if I get my day started early enough I’m always pleasantly surprised how much free time I have left at the end of it. What I actually hate is the combination of waking up and getting up.

Waking up is the first challenge. Or rather, remaining awake after waking up for the first time is the first challenge — the actual act of waking up isn’t, in and of itself, especially difficult.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I tend to have very vivid dreams in the morning after I’ve woken up for the first time and fallen asleep again. Sometimes I have very vivid dreams immediately before I wake up for the first time, too, and the immediate temptation is to fall back asleep again to “finish” them, because waking up almost inevitably interrupts them at an interesting, exciting or otherwise pleasing point. (Sometimes they’re nightmares — err, morningmares? — but even then there’s a sort of morbid curiosity to see how things pan out.)

It’s so easy to just close my eyes and drift back off to sleep again, particularly if Andie has gone out to work and I’ve been left by myself. Without anywhere I “have” to be and with a job that I don’t need to start until late morning, I can quite feasibly fall back asleep again if I want to.

Doing that isn’t really compatible with having a productive day, though, and certainly isn’t compatible with the programme of light exercise (walking 3-4 miles a day at a fairly leisurely pace) I’ve been following for the past couple of weeks. So I’ve been forcing myself out of bed in the morning, even if I don’t really want to. And this morning I really didn’t want to, but I managed it anyway.

One tool I’ve found quite helpful in making myself wake up and get up first time is a freebie download for Vita called Wake Up Club. This is basically little more than an alarm clock app, but it has a few little features built in that engage the brain enough to prevent you from falling asleep again.

There are two main ways it does this. Firstly is the fact that in order to get it to shut up in the first place, you have to actually pick up the Vita, press the “Yes” key when it asks if it’s all right to let the Wake Up Club app bring the Vita out of sleep mode without you having to touch the power button. Once the app is open, you then have to tap on a leisurely bouncing image of your PSN avatar to actually get the thing to be quiet.

Except there’s another step after that, too, which is where the “club” bit of the app’s title comes from. Every morning, Wake Up Club picks a bunch of people who have all set their alarm for the same time and invites them to harass each other if they don’t wake up immediately. You do this by tapping on their avatar, which causes their Vita to yell at them until they, too, inform their device that they have indeed woken up and could they please stop shouting at them?

I’m actually yet to have to do this on other “players” who are using the app, since everyone seems to wake up fairly quickly. The only time I get to tap on other people’s avatars are if there’s no-one else “playing,” or if the Vita has had some sort of PSN-related meltdown in the night and has lost connection. Then you get to tap on the avatars of computer-controlled “club” members until they wake up, which takes a good few seconds. By the time you have finished tapping on things, you’re well and truly awake, those simple motor actions being enough to get your brain moving beyond that point that will allow you to fall asleep again as soon as your head hits the pillow.

Also there are trophies if you are a trophy whore and like receiving arbitrary rewards for “gamifying” your life. So there’s that.

Anyway. Yeah. If you’re having trouble waking up, get some form of alarm clock that requires you to do something more than just hit it to shut it up. If you have a Vita, Wake Up Club is as good as anything, particularly as it’s free.