I woke up at 8am today. It's a sunny Saturday morning and although I have a lot of work to do for class, I could have slept in. My eyes flew open and I was awake. I wondered why this couldn't happen on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning when it seems near impossible to get out of the comfort of my warm bed, when the pillow feels, just right. I didn't get much more sleep last night than I typically do (I had a low key night and was in bed fairly early), but even on the nights I'm out pretty late, or drink, etc, I still wake up and feel more rested than during the week.
Don't get me wrong, there are mornings I force myself to sleep more on weekends, and there are mornings I sleep until 10 without moving from how I lay down the night before due to maybe one too many beers. However, overall I wake up early on weekends whereas I could always use another hour (aka 54 minutes, keep reading you'll understand) or two of sleep on week days.
I think a big component of this is that on weekends it's my time, and I don't have to sit in class and pay attention (or not), I don't have to sit across from a client and listen to their challenges and I don't have to deal with office bull shit and politics. My weekends I can basically do whatever I want. I have limited responsibilities in general considering my age, because I currently live off loans, pay monthly bills off loans (have to do this today, mental note don't forget, E!), I work and I go to school, I see my friends when I can, see my family when I can, and otherwise; it's all about me.
So the big areas of my life are objectively, and more importantly are subjectively, great. Not without some significant and insignificant challenges, but great.
Why then is it so hard to get up in the morning? It's not that I'm not getting enough sleep, it's not that I don't have good days to look forward to, it's not that I'm not excited by the things in my life...so what is it?
Well, clinically, when someone has sleeping challenges (hard time falling asleep, staying asleep, sleeping "too much" or "too little") we tend to think possibly some anxiety and/or depression which might have a stroke of truth with me, but frankly I'm high functioning and don't have many of the key components to these disorders to be clinically unwell, per se...so I'm going to blame it on The Alarm Clock.
My alarm clock is an iHome which has my iPod in it, which hasn't been updated with music in at least a year, thanks to Pandora and the like. I don't even have the alarm wake me with music because I feel like that might not wake me up. I have very vivid dreams that I don't know that I'm sleeping. I think that maybe the jarring beeping is the only thing that can shake me out of my slumber sometimes.
But when that alarm goes off, I jump up and use my iHome remote to hit snooze. Remote. Yes. My iHome is placed on the other side of my room so that I have to get up and turn it off, thus getting me out of bed...however, I default to hitting the remote snooze button. The further problem is the battery on my remote is dying so I have wrestle the remote and press snooze really hard 4 or 5 times to make it snooze. The BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP in the mean time is enough to make anyone's blood pressure shoot up, yet I somehow manage to sleep for another 9 minutes.
I have in my half-slumber calculated that I know that this gives me almost an hour of 9 minute intervals to snooze (54 minutes). I have learned this the hard way. I can not indefinitely "snooze", since the iHome says, "Well screw you, you're going to over sleep after hitting the snooze 6 times". I guess at that point I deserve it.
I'm embarrassed to say (and probably to my roommate's chagrin - sorry!) most mornings I use the 54 minutes. It's terrible, I'm not getting good sleep for that last near hour, and I purposefully set my alarm so that I get the "treat" of sleeping more after the alarm goes off. There is something to the slow waking up process, it's like I know I want to be eased into the "bad news" that is the morning.
I think now that I'm writing this, that I want to change this bad habit. There are many reasons to jump out of bed in the morning and start a fresh day, like ripping off a bandaid - that also pulls the small hairs from your arm off, the pain is short and then you're fine.
I'm putting it here so that I can hold my self accountable, but what I'm going to try and do, is set my alarm for the time I'm supposed to get up, and get up. No snoozing. That way I'm sleeping well until I have to be up, and the foot I jump in the air when the BEEP BEEP BEEP starts, is only once a morning. I'm going to keep you posted. I may have to concede and snooze once - you know like that "harm reduction approach" versus complete sobriety. We'll see, as I'm already sounding slightly ambivalent to change.
Thankfully I still have tomorrow to wake up from the sunlight, and put off this experiment. "I'll start on Monday", I hear that plan works for diets too...ha.
Until next time,
E
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