Description: Rolls over. Checks phone. Five minutes left. Alarm goes off. Hits snooze. Repeats three times. This morning routine sound familiar? This week, Dr. Boogren challenges a particularly bad habit.
Resources:
1. To get the inside-scoop on poor morning routines, check out the article referenced by Dr. Boogren in this week's episode here!
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Transcription: Hi, and welcome to episode 25 of Self-Care for Educators. I am your host, Tina Boogren, and this week's invitation might be a challenge. The invitation is: let's see if we can get out of bed in the morning without hitting the snooze button. Ooh, I know that can be really hard. That can be really, really hard, but hear me out.
Okay. I've been looking into this and, oh man, you can find a lot of research that tells us why the snooze button is so bad for us. In actuality, what we're doing when we're hitting the snooze button is we are interfering with our own body's ability to wake itself up ... Our own natural wake mechanisms ... And, what that snooze button is doing is actually setting us up to be more exhausted during the day ahead. So, there is a sleep expert, Adam Tishman, and he says when you let yourself fall back asleep, you're tricking your body into thinking it's going back into sleep mode. "When your alarm goes off again, your body and brain are confused, resulting in that foggy feeling called sleep inertia. Sleep inertia can stay with you throughout the entire day, making you feel actually way more tired." Okay so not good.
Many of us have made snooze a natural ... It's just, it's what we do in the morning. Right? I actually ... for a long time have set my alarm extra early to allow myself to snooze one, two, three times. And, it's a habit that as of late, I've been really working on to try to break this habit. So, that's the challenge for this week. Let's work on this together. Let's see if we can break our addiction to the snooze button. And, here's the most important part. See if it makes a difference in how we feel during the day.
So, decide what you need to do. The hard part is, is because this has become a habit. Right? So, we might even just hit the snooze button without even thinking about it. So, maybe you want to move your alarm to somewhere else in your room so it pauses your automatic response and forces you to do something different. So, that way you're just aware, right? So, the alarm goes off. You go to hit the snooze where you normally would. Your alarm is not there, so you have to go find it. And, in the finding your brain registers the fact that, Oh, wait, I'm up. So ideally put your alarm somewhere where you have to get out of bed, so you've already done the hardest part by getting yourself out of bed to turn that alarm off. You just ... you from there ... you just have to stay out of bed. You just have to resist the urge to crawl back under the covers, which is really hard when it's dark, and it's cold. So, resist that urge, and maybe attach to it some sort of treat that you look forward to. Combine it with some other things that we've talked about.
So, I really, many of you know, love my morning coffee, right? So, when my alarm goes off, and I don't hit snooze, I just, my brain goes, Coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee. Right? I head straight to the coffee pot to get that delicious cup of coffee started for the day. And then, I've got that time that I usually would be snoozing where I get a little bit of time for quiet reflection ... Just quiet time in the morning, which is a really great way to start the day.
I would much rather start the day in that calm state, rather than that frenzied, crazy, how many times can I snooze before I really have to get going? And then, it just turns into chaos in the morning. And, when we get our day started with that sense of chaos it lasts throughout the day. Our goal is to really start our day with that sense of calm ... to enter into the workday and enter even the weekend with that sense of calm. And, one of the ways that we can do that is to resist the snooze button, get ourselves out of bed, do whatever we need to do, and figure out if that's helping us feel more alert, more in tune, more engaged, more calm during the day. Again, big fan of that action research. Try it out. See what happens.
I'd love for you to jump over into the Facebook page, too, and share. What are your tips and tricks? Those of you that have broken up with the snooze button ... you've been successful in getting to the other side ... How did you do it? How did you do it? Or anyone ... just tips and ideas. Or, if it's something that you're currently working on, or just ... just ... I love when we're able to share and gather ideas from each other. So that's it. It could be really hard. It could be a hard week, but we're going to try, and we're going to see what happens. Give it a shot, and if you mess up, and you forget, guess what? You have seven days this week to try it. So maybe, maybe you miss it on Monday. You totally forgot, but we're going to try again on Tuesday. Okay?
Oh man, as always a huge thank you to Brooke for making this happen. Thank you to Marzano Resources and Solution Tree for this job I get to do. And, thank you to you, my amazing, bad-ass Self-Care Squad. Here we go. Let's tackle the snooze button.