Golden Slumbers III: How to Overcome Snoozing in The Morning
Six-month-long successful struggle with my 2023 New Year’s resolution of becoming an early riser
Early rising has been identified as a fundamental habit in self-discipline, productivity, and success literature. They all emphasize the importance of a healthy morning routine for long-term success. Consequently, in January 2023, I made a New Year’s resolution to become an early riser.
Amongst all sleep aspects, I found early rising (The others being falling and staying asleep) the most challenging. Being a perpetual night owl, my Circadian Rhythms tend towards the later part of the day. Despite this, in my 20s, I could wake up with the first alarm. Not so much anymore.
Our Frenemy: Limbic Fiction
Waking up involves activating our sympathetic nervous system when the alarm goes off. The Cortisol Awakening Response [1] naturally wakes us by spiking cortisol (stress hormone) levels. Like an old computer, I find it hard to ‘boot up’ against Limbic Friction. I would quote Dr. Andrew Huberman to describe this concept.
… strain that’s required to overcome one of two states within your body. One state is one of anxiousness, where you’re anxious and therefore you can’t calm down, you can’t relax, and therefore you can’t engage in some particular activity or thought pattern that you would like …
— Dr. Andrew Huberman [2]
The good old Alarm Clock helps us wake up by using our evolutionary brain pathways associated with stress activation on hearing unexpected sounds. Try watching a horror movie on mute, it will become less scary, even comical. I observed that the problem was not related to getting out of bed when the alarm started blaring but my habit of pressing the snooze and falling asleep again.
Get that Adrenaline and Cortisol pumping!
This article describes my observations and solutions in the increasing order of impact. My goal was to shift my Circadian Rhythms to that of an early riser.
1. Dr. Owl and Mr. Early Bird:
I observed a stark difference in my personality between night and early morning. Despite being tired, Dr. Owl is optimistic about pushing the bedtimes to later and setting earlier alarms. On the contrary, Mr. Early Bird is concerned about losing the following day due to sleep deprivation, hence preferring to snooze. I had to push against the biases of Dr. Owl and Mr. Early Bird by repeatedly reminding myself of their tendencies. This awareness improved my sleep routine but not my Circadian Rhythm.
2. Bright light therapy:
Scientific studies show that [5] sunlight resets the Circadian timer that expires after about 16 hours, causing us to fall asleep. Living in the Pacific Northwest, I get much less Sun in winter. With up to nine months of perpetually rainy and overcast winters, it seems like even the Sun takes a vacation. To counteract this, I developed the habit of spending an hour after waking up in the presence of a very bright light therapy lamp [4] with the brightness level set to the maximum. Using this for several weeks made waking up easier as my natural Circadian Rhythms started to shift earlier in the day.
3. Training to break the snooze habit:
During weekend afternoons, I trained myself by setting the alarm to turn on after 10 to 15 minutes, lying in bed (not falling asleep), and when the alarm went on, switching off the alarm, and immediately walking to a different room that does not have a bed. Doing 4 to 5 repetitions, even though I was not asleep during the whole exercise, did decrease the frequency of snoozing in the morning.
4. Remind yourself of your goals in the morning:
I observed that from the time I am out of bed and before snoozing the alarm, the question: “What is the point of waking up so early?” would pop up. Due to grogginess, I would blank out and default to: “No point in waking up so early!”
Therefore, the night before, I started memorizing three tasks to be accomplished in the morning. This reduced the mental work required to remind myself of the purpose of waking up at that time.
5. Something to look forward to in the morning:
Inspired by self-help authors, I tried working out first thing in the morning. I had bitten more than I could chew as I needed to wake up several hours earlier. On the other hand, starting small by incrementally adjusting my wake-up time and giving myself treats, like gummy vitamins, watching funny sitcoms while making breakfast, and reading self-help literature, gave me something to look forward to in the grogginess, and defined my morning routine.
6. Alarm system:
As mentioned above, sound can effectively activate our sympathetic nervous system. I used to struggle to the extent that keeping my phone alarm in the bathroom and solving arithmetic problems as a disabling technique stopped working. Consequently, I bought “Screaming Meaning” [3] a loud alarm (Up to 120 decibels) for deep sleepers. This fallback system always works as I set it up out of arms reach. I also set a phone alarm 45 minutes before the Screaming Meanie. This system works wonderfully because:
- Most of the time, I would wake up with the Phone alarm to avoid dealing with the unpleasant Screaming Meanie. After waking up, I would promptly disable the Screaming Meanie.
- If I pressed snooze on the phone alarm, the Screaming Meanie would turn on after 45 minutes. To shut down this alarm, I need to go to another room, search for and put on ear plugs, find a stepladder from the garage, carry it to the room containing the blaring Screaming Meanie, and, climb the ladder and switch off the alarm.
All the physical activity of going from room to room, searching for earplugs, and carrying a step ladder while a loud alarm is blaring in another room creates the spike of adrenaline that always wakes me up.
Final Thoughts
Changing my Circadian Rhythm to become an early riser was challenging. Starting January 2023 with a New Year resolution, it took me about six months of daily struggle, failure, analysis, and trying various ideas to finally consistently wake up early. The trick was a combination of accepting that in the wee hours, self-control is unreliable and developing mechanisms to activate my stress response enough to keep me awake and prevent snoozing.
References:
[1] https://www.risescience.com/blog/cortisol-and-sleep
[2] https://dexa.ai/huberman/episodes/doc_1954?sectionSid=sec_25042&chunkSid=chunk_50137
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Screaming-Meanie-Extremely-Sleepers-Multi-Purpose/dp/B000JGDLLU/ref=asc_df_B000JGDLLU/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312098775000&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=18337072336939931615&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9032879&hvtargid=pla-570114581650&psc=1&mcid=5252b30a0f0f363993d7b9e17de51ab8&gclid=Cj0KCQiA1rSsBhDHARIsANB4EJYfqu-E_dw_zp8sDxKOaU-_NZHXu1JhRseqeVsfLpbaSJuyuQr-nTEaAvfFEALw_wcB
[4] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09YV6FTXK/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
[5] https://www.healthline.com/health-news/exposure-to-natural-light-during-the-day-may-help-you-sleep-better#How-sleep-patterns-shift-with-the-seasons
If you found this article helpful, kindly click the “Follow” button. It is a simple action that carries no obligation and motivates me to create more useful content. Your support is genuinely appreciated.
