Never Hit the Snooze Button!…

Have you ever hit the snooze button? I have and every morning I’ve hit the snooze button I felt like I started my day off with failure. I then asked many other people how they felt after hitting snooze on their alarms and the response has been the same. They were in a negative mental state for the better part of the day—tired, groggy, angry at themselves, feeling like they were already behind and therefore stressed, etc. These observations have led me to an unpopular idea that you should never hit the snooze button because when you do you begin your day as a failure. Hearing that might make you ready to skip this lesson, but allow me to explain, and furthermore, tell you what you can do to prevent that. Once you hear the full lesson, try out my methods and see how positively they affect the way you wake up. That in turn will positively impact the rest of your day. When you do, I’d love to hear how they help you out. Also, if there’s any other tips you have for waking up better, more rested, I’d love to know those too.

SELECTED LINKS FROM EPISODE:

-Eat the Frog Article: https://www.briantracy.com/blog/time-management/the-truth-about-frogs/

-Sleep Apps: https://www.sleepassociation.org/sleep-treatments/sleep-apps/

-Other Sleep Apps: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/317816.php

-Why You Should Not Sleep With Your Phone at Night: https://www.verywellhealth.com/reasons-why-you-should-not-sleep-with-your-cell-phone-4140997

-Not Twice T-Shirt Campaign: http://nottwice.org

-A Very LA Birthday Short Film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9SHJaepE0c

-Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/philsvitek

-Merchandise: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/phil-svitek—360-creative-coach/

-Adorama Affiliate Link: https://www.adorama.com/?utm_source=rflaid914115

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Transcript:

Let’s imagine it’s the morning and you’re dead asleep but then the alarm goes off. You hear it but you’re groggy and tired. So you tell yourself five more minutes and hit the snooze button. In that moment, you’ve failed. You have failed to get up and subconsciously you associate yourself as a failure. Doesn’t mean you are one, but now it’ll take more energy and mental strength to go about your day and get things done.

And by the way, no judgment. I’ve done this plenty of times too before I came to this revelation.

What I noticed initially is that people across all disciplines stress the importance of morning routines. However, they overlook the waking up aspect of it. Is waking up not part of a morning routine? Many will debate about when you should wake up but they never discuss how you should wake up, which I argue is more important than when you do. If you wake up groggy in the morning and hit that snooze button, it’s going to take a lot to get you into gear. It’s why I believe so many people drink coffee as their first real act of the day and then continue throughout. It’s why people use cold showers as a means to shock them into life. Both are methods that are used to overcome the earlier defeat of waking up with failure aka hitting the snooze button.

And the more a person hits that snooze button, the harder it will be to overcome those negative mental effects of having done so.

The reason why I’m so seemingly hyperbolic about the idea that if you hit the snooze button you start your day off as a failure is because it creates a chain reaction. A snowball effect of negativity.

Before I get into the full effects, let me cite another ideology people advocate. It’s called the “eat the frog” principle. The term comes from Mark Twain who once said that if the first thing you do each morning is eat a live frog, you can go through the day knowing that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long. The analogy is that the frog is your biggest, most important task. It is the one you’re most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do it sooner rather than later.

It’s a way of saying that you should discipline yourself to immediately do what’s hardest on your daily task list before jumping into a new task. Everything else by comparison will seem easy because if you’re able to do what you feared most, you can certainly do the tasks you were looking forward to. I know from personal experience that this does work wonders.

Another way to look at it is “just get the thing you’re dreading over with”. We often build mountains out of molehills and eating the frog, so to speak, is a preventative method for not letting that molehill build up.

So how does this relate to the act of waking up in the morning? Well, if you find yourself in a place where you’re so tired you want to hit the snooze button, then the act of getting out of bed is your frog in that instance. It’s a hard task that you can tackle. You can either choose to do it or you can fall back asleep—sleep which won’t be satisfying and will eat at you mentally because now you’ve introduced the idea that you’re tired to yourself. And when you finally do wake up, your brain will think to itself “I didn’t get enough sleep”. You’ll feel behind already and that’s a bad feeling to have at the start of the day. You shouldn’t be stressing yourself out. You should feel excited by what’s ahead.

At this point, I think I’ve properly beaten it into you why I think it’s a terrible idea to hit the snooze button. Again, don’t think I’m judging you because part of how I came to this conclusion is through my own experiences. Because of that, allow me to share strategies to not ever have to hit snooze and more importantly, these tricks will allow you to feel better about yourself and therefore tackle projects with energy and enthusiasm.

First off, always be honest with yourself when you set your alarm. Hitting the snooze button equates to more time in bed. Well, if you have the luxury of hitting the snooze button several times, or even just once, that means that when you set your alarm initially, you weren’t honest with yourself. Set your alarm to the time that you need to wake up. Not a minute before then. If your body naturally wakes itself up before your alarm clock, perfect. If not, then you know deep down that it’s going off for a reason and it’s a necessity that you get out of bed, not wishful thinking. And besides, snoozing for 5 to 10 minutes is not restful. It’s not like a power nap. It’s disrupted, shallow sleep that won’t really energize you.

My second tip is to use a smart alarm clock, one that senses your sleeping rhythms and will wake you up when you’re not in deep sleep. A lot of times we’re groggy in the morning because the alarm went off while we’re in REM cycle or another relaxed state. What a smart alarm, or sleep app as it’s more commonly referred to as, does is wake you up when you’re in shallow sleep. It’s the stage of the sleep cycle when it’s okay to be woken up because it doesn’t feel disruptive. I remember trying a sleep app for the first time and it felt magical. It was night and day compared to a standard alarm. If I had to quantify it, I felt 95% less agitated at having to wake up just based on what stage of my sleep cycle I was woken up during. There’s plenty of excellent sleep apps out there for Android and iOS. I’ve included a few links in the description. Quick side tip, put your phone on airplane mode when you go to sleep. Trust me, there’s so many reasons for it.

The third strategy I have for you to make sure you get out of bed once the alarm sounds is to place the alarm as far away from you as you can. Put it away from your bed. Make yourself have to physically stand up out of bed to turn it off because at that point once you’re out of bed, it won’t make sense to you to go back into it. You might not love it initially, but the inertia of being out of bed will compel you to carry on and start your day. The initial annoyance of waking up will quickly shift into a sense of accomplishment as you start to tackle other tasks. That’s the snowball effect, except in positive terms. You hit the snooze button, that’s the snowball effect of negativity. Mind you, this strategy doesn’t work if you’re using a sleep app because you have to have the phone on the bed in order for it to properly measure your sleep. My suggestion if you are using a sleep app is to place it as far on the bed as you can so you have to move to stop the alarm.

My fourth tip, plan your day out in advance, ideally the night before. This gives you a feeling of excitement to tackle the day. When you don’t know what your day has in store for you or how you’re going to execute tasks, you’re much more apt to avoid the day and thereby hitting the snooze button. But if you feel genuine excitement for what’s to come or at least have things mapped out, then you won’t want to hit the snooze button. You’ll want to wake up.

And my final tip is to make sure you go to bed feeling happy. Even if you have to wake up earlier than normal and you’ll be getting 5 hours sleep that night, tell your brain “I can’t believe that I’m going to get a full 5 hours of sleep”. It’s a mental shift. Many people wake up lethargic in the morning because they went to bed already implanting it in their mind that they wouldn’t be getting enough sleep. If you go to bed excited for bed and grateful, you’ll wake up that same way. Simply put, how you go to bed is how you’ll wake up. So in order to wake up on the right side of the bed, you must go to sleep on the right side of it. If you had a hard and depressing day, meditate before going to bed to release yourself of that negativity and shift into a state of joy.

Try these out and see how positively they affect the way you wake up. That in turn will positively impact the rest of your day. I experience this everyday because I put all these to use each and every day. These are disciplines that yield wonderful results. So test them out. I’d love to hear how they help you out. Also, if there’s any other tips you have for waking up better, more rested, I’d love to know those too.

But that’s it for today’s lesson. Free free to click over to any of the numerous lessons I’ve created just for you though. I have so many you can check out, like how to channel negative thinking for positive results or how to avoid cliches in your work. You can access all those along with other free resources on my website at philsvitek.com. Lastly, a huge thank you to the people that helped make this episode financially possible. If you too would like to support this show, you can either head on over to my Patreon or sport some merch from my store. Links are down below as well. Or you can just tell a friend about this show, which will help pass on my knowledge to them as well and we can build a great community of like-minded creatives. Anyway, thanks for taking the time to tune in. I’m @PhilSvitek on social media and I’ll see you next Wednesday with another lesson. Bye!