Thoughts

I have always been a morning person. Many people complain about having to be up early in the morning, I do not mind. Being up early, that is. I mind the complaining. Sleep is a skill that seems to have eluded me for so many years and in my attempt to finally get it right I have recently fallen pray to the snooze bug. In typical Peter fashion, one night I went to bed a little later than I should have based upon how much sleep that left me with come morning. I slept through my alarm, which I do not do very often at all. I have traditionally been a rather light sleeper, though times appear to be changing. To defend against the sleep-through offensive, I initiated the snooze.

I wake up to the alarm on my cell phone, which I have posted previously, but now I have told you again. Deal with it. What worlds this has opened me up to are fantastic. Three alarms. I know there are alarm clocks that do offer multiple alarms to be set, for roommates and married folk, but they are not for me. The electricity in my home blinks out at the drop of a hat, so why risk it going out in the middle of the night and thus resetting my alarm clock?

Anyway, for the past few months I have been waking up with alarms set for 5:00am and then 5:15am. There has been a sharp decline in my ability to wake up and meet the day since I made the change to snooze. The problem is that I am actually more tired when I get up the second time than I would be if I just rolled out of bed after the first alarm.

I used to have a problem with waking up some 30-45 minutes before my alarm went off. I told myself that I would just get up at that point rather than go back to sleep. I knew it back then, so why would I think that a 15 minute snooze would be a good idea now?

I believe we condition ourselves on the weekends when we try to wring every last drop of sleep out of the night. During the week I have to be up for work, but Saturdays and Sundays are different. And when I get 5 hours of sleep a night during the week, would it not seem like a good idea to try to recharge my battery as much as possible on the weekends? So I wake up, glance at the clock, see I have not yet wasted the day away, and go back to sleep. This mentality has carried over to my weekday mornings. But no more. A change is necessary, so a change we make. I will henceforth no longer use the snooze.