I love my bed. It’s my favorite place on the earth.
I love crawling into bed at the end of a busy day and feeling the muscles in my back relax against the mattress.
I love curling up on top of the comforter with a throw blanket covering me and taking a nap.
But I hate getting out of bed each morning.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m actually a morning person. I’m my freshest and most productive once I’ve had my morning shower, but getting from the bed to the shower often is the most difficult part of my day.
So, of course, I find myself hitting the snooze button several times each morning, delaying the inevitable. I, like many of you, typically snooze until I absolutely have to get up or I’ll be late.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with loving sleep. Arianna Huffington believes so much in the importance of sleep that she wrote a book about it, The Sleep Revolution. Huffington thinks we need to focus more on getting good sleep because we are a sleep-deprived society, which causes us more stress and leads to poor decision making. She also wrote about the importance of sleep in her book, Thrive, claiming that ample sleep can literally change our lives and help us become more successful.
We need sleep, and most of us are happy to adhere to Huffington’s advice. The issue is that we love sleep so much that we don’t want to get out of bed, so we set our alarm clocks long before we actually need to get up and repeatedly hit snooze.
We seriously have to stop hitting the snooze button. We’re doing ourselves more harm than good.
We create disturbed sleep when we hit the snooze button. Quite simply, 10-15 minutes is not long enough for our bodies to go through a regular sleep cycle, which means we start a cycle, interrupt it and start again. We’re essentially repeatedly pulling ourselves out of a sleep cycle, which results in us being even more tired when we get out of bed.
The sleep inertia created can take four or more hours to recover from, meaning we’re basically allowing the snooze button to ruin our morning before we even get out of bed.
The solution? Set your alarm for the time you actually need to get out of bed, then get up. You may be tired for the first couple of days, but your body will train itself to wake up naturally in no time.
I know you love your bed. Believe me, I do too, but ruining your morning for an extra 30 minutes of terrible sleep just isn’t worth it. Going to bed 30 minutes earlier… now that’s an idea I support!
