How we set-up our day determines how we end our day.
It’s so common for many of us to hit the snooze button everyday.
The amount of sleep you get never feels like enough, so you use your snooze button to tack on an extra 10, 20, 30 minutes… whatever you can squeeze in.
Those stolen minutes — as delicious as they seem — aren’t worth it.
I’ve heard you should get up as soon as your alarm rings — but why is hitting that snooze button bad for you? Turns out this habit is counterintuitive; instead of giving us a little more rest, it makes us more tired during the day.
Contrary to what you might think, those spurts of sleep between alarms won’t leave you feeling more rested. You’re basically oscillating between sleep and wakefulness without reaching deep, restorative sleep, which takes longer than just a few minutes to enter, according to Xue Ming, a professor of neurology at the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, who specializes in sleep disorders.
The body needs some time to get you ready to wake up. When you let yourself go back to sleep, your body thinks, “False alarm! I guess I didn’t need to do anything, because we’re not getting up after all,” and settles in.
When that buzzer goes off a second time, your body and brain are taken by surprise, resulting in that groggy, fuzzy-headed feeling called sleep inertia. The more you snooze, the more confused your body and brain get (“So are we going back to sleep or not?!”), so you’ll probably feel more out of it even though you actually spent extra time in bed.
What’s more, this groggy, fuzzy-headed feeling can persist for up to two to four hours.
This sleep inertia leads to difficulty getting our day started. It’s harder to get in the zone and focus. Our attention span is shorter throughout day. We get cranky more easily and we give up on ourselves.
At day’s end, we feel like garbage because we didn’t get our stuff done and then we repeat the snooze button habit all over again.
The answer here is simple. Set your alarm for the time you really want to get up. When your alarm goes off, GET UP!
A simple answer doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a simple habit to break. Tell yourself before you go to bed that you are going to get up when your alarm goes off. Then when it goes off in the morning, count down 5-4-3-2-1 and GET UP.
It literally, takes our brain 5 seconds to talk us out of doing the thing we promised ourselves we’d do. Counting backwards and then taking action will interrupt your habit brain.
Think about how great it will feel to NOT be in a brain fog for hours. Think about how much more you’ll be able to accomplish. Think about how good you’ll feel at the end of the day.
