THIS BLOG IS A WORK IN PROGRESS

A book and the snooze button

Over the past few months, through a process of trial and error, and motivated by laziness and desire to get more sleep, I have discovered a morning routine that works for me. It doesn't involve waking up at 5am, doesn't involve any yoga, meditation, or even journalling, infact I have actively tried to include as little as possible in it.

Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" did a fantastic job of convincing me of the importance of sleep, although whilst there is some controversy over how much Walker exaggerates the impact of lack of sleep. The book certainly helped me recognise how much better my days are when I get some good quality shut eye.

I've always been capable of waking up early, Walker's book explain how and why young children wake up earlier than their teenage counterparts, despite this as a teenager I was able to hold down a job as a paperboy that required 6:15 am starts. This doesn't mean I'm good at getting up however, I don't think I'm unique in the fact that I will risk being late to work and tarnishing my professional reputation for an extra few minutes of lying in bed.

I began spending quite a few more minutes lying in bed and hitting the snooze button after graduating from university and starting a full time job. It became of game of seeing how many time I could hit snooze before I absolutely had to get up and it wasn't a game I enjoyed. Matthew Walker can tell you how the snooze button doesn't make up for real sleep, and I never truly believed an extra 9 minutes of sleep was going to leave me feeling radically more refreshed, but health reasons weren't my main motivation for getting out of bed quicker after that first alarm.

Quite frankly, hitting snooze first thing in the morning made me feel like a loser, it was almost like the first thing I did in the day was admit defeat and give up on the goal of getting out of bed at the time I wanted to when I set the alarm. I did not want to feel like a loser at any point in my day, especially not right at the start! I decided something had to be done.

Problem Statement

Two of Mattew Walker's rule for sleep are that you should aim to get eight of hour sleep on a consistent basis, and the bed time and wake up time should remain consistent. Unfortunately for me, I could not just move my bed time to be earlier in the night and keep it consistent. I play volleyball and have training at least two nights a week, I regularly don't get back from training until it is too late to get 8 hours of sleep and make it into work in the morning.

As I couldn't push

I came up with the follow list of requirements for my morning routine:

• Shower
• Brush Teeth
• Get changed
• Pack Bag
• Arrive at station for 7:35 am

My morning routine 'nice to haves' are:

• Time to iron my shirt (just in case I haven't got one prepared)
• Time to take a different route and not be too late if my train is delayed/cancelled
• The opportunity to be a bit slow (sleepy) whilst I went about my morning tasks

Solution

Once I clearly undestood my morning's