Many people “cheat” on their morning routine and they hit the snooze button. Maybe hitting that snooze button is part of the morning routine now. How hard is it for you to wake up in the morning? Do you like pushing that snooze button? Have you ever wondered why?
Research shows that hitting the snooze button is a bad idea for our health because it disrupts our natural sleep patterns and it also messes up with our ability to wake up naturally. When the alarm goes off, our body gets into the waking up process. If we don’t wake up and we touch snooze, our body will try to go to sleep again and this cycle repeats itself a few times if you like playing with that button.
At a high level, after we hit that button, our body will try to go to sleep once again and if we reach the REM sleep, we’ll get into the fight or flight mode, and our body has to suffer from this. This is similar to starting and stopping the car a few times before leaving. You’ll also put in place some disruptive sleep patterns so you’ll probably wake up a few times at night.
The snooze button will also set your brain to tell you “a few more minutes” every time you need to get up because it gets used to that. I’m not even going to mention the fact that you’ll be late for whatever you need to do, which will make you panic once you realize how late it is. Uhm, I said I’m not going to mention it… oh well…
But… (yes, there is a but), you can change that. The cure is to try to keep yourself awake when the alarm goes off. “No shit, Sherlock! I know that’s what I need to do, but I can’t!” Well, you need to find something stronger than you and your sleep. Ideally, it would be an awesome purpose in life, but we all know that when the motivation is down, we’re there with it. Try planning to do something exciting the first thing in the morning. Remember when you were a child and it was Christmas morning? You probably were the first person awake because you were looking forward to crawl under the Christmas tree and dig into the presents. Excitement is the key. It can be taking a sip from your favorite type of coffee or eating your special breakfast. For me, it is to work at my upcoming book and honestly, if I don’t do it the first thing in the morning, I don’t have the time to do it during the day.
Now, if you think about it, snoozing is just a way procrastination takes advantage of us. Those drops of dopamine strengthens the snoozing button and that’s way it sticks with us. If we manage to find something exciting to do in the morning, we’ll get the dopamine while (or after) doing that, not from the snooze button. We created the habit so we can destroy it.
What exciting activity can you set to do in the morning so you won’t hit that snooze button anymore?