When I was in high school, I had to wake up at 6 am to commute to school. Early in my career, I routinely woke up around 6 am to go to the gym before going to work as a corporate attorney. Even back then, I was a professional “snoozer” — I would set my alarm earlier than necessary to give myself extra time to wake up.
When I started to work for myself, that strategy revealed its weakness. In the fog of waking up, hitting snooze two or three times easily became eight or ten times. My wake up time was wildly inconsistent, and that inconsistency had a cost.
In August 2013, I resolve to stop hitting the snooze button for good. I’ve maintained that resolve ever since.
If I can do it, so can you.
Before I share my strategy, it’s important to dispel three myths about this practice:
- The Myth of Perfection
- The Myth of Instant Success
- The Myth of the Morning Person
(1) The Myth of Perfection
No myth of perfection here: I am not a robot.
My strategy is not a rigid mandate for getting out of bed early at all costs. Instead, it has been a supportive framework to take me out of the habit of hitting snooze and give me control over how I want to use my morning time.
Sometimes, the body needs more sleep. I have had mornings where I’ve allowed myself to crawl back into bed after shutting the alarm.
In those cases, rather than reacting with an unconscious habit of hitting the snooze button, I made the conscious choice to go back to sleep.
I was in control.
I’ve found that this, above all else, is what most people want: some sense of control and autonomy around their days.
When I choose to allow myself to sleep in, I don’t wake up feeling like I did something wrong by “oversleeping.”
That said, I have found that going back to sleep rarely makes me feel better. No matter how tired I feel when I wake up, sticking to my proven strategy tends to serve me best. The structure holds me well.
(2) The Myth of Instant Success
This isn’t once-and-done. Breaking habits is a process. Whenever we implement something new, the road is bumpy. We try. We fail. We try again. We fail again.
When we reflect back on our early experience of learning something new, we often gloss over those early days when failure felt more common than success. With the distance of time, we recall those bumpy roads as smooth paths.
Unless you keep a detailed journal of your process — as I did — it’s easy to forget about the potholes you encountered along the way.
Whatever strategy you use to re-condition your sabotaging habits — no matter how proven by other people — is unlikely to be perfect for you. The process of behavior change is one of creating awareness of what works for you by trying and testing strategies and adjusting them.
The tweaking never stops. A strategy that works for a certain period of time might stop working, requiring new adjustments depending on what season of life you’re in.
That said, a good framework does a lot of the work for you and removes a lot of wasted energy from trial and failure..
(3) The Myth That You Need to Be a “Morning Person”
Many people have told me that they “wish” they could stop hitting snooze and wake up early, but they’re “not a morning person.”
Other people have asked me for my strategy because they want to become a “morning person.”
If you fall into either camp, here’s what I want you to know:
You don’t need to be a morning person.
In fact, you may never become a “morning person.”
Whether you’re a “morning person” is a function of your biology; not what time you get up in the morning.
Even after over a decade of consistently waking up at the crack of dawn, I’m still not a “morning person.” There is rarely — if ever — a day when I bound out of bed chirpy and chipper, ready to face the day.
It takes me a while to get going.
That said, I’ve come to love the early morning time. It gives me a time in my day when nobody expects to hear from me. Those early hours give me a space to fit in my workout at my own pace and do my best thinking and writing before the demands of the world set in.
All of that became possible only when I stopped hitting snooze and got consistent with my wake-up time.
Do you want to receive my complete step-by-step strategy for getting up early without hitting snooze? Stay tuned for upcoming installments of this series, or sign up to receive the entire framework in your inbox.
[…] Read: 3 Myths that Keep You From Creating a Consistent Morning Routine […]