Wednesday 9 January 2008

Sleeping in.

Today's blog was supposed to be coming at you from around 9am this morning but it's now 6 in the evening and I have had another day of doing nout. You see I have not been getting up at a reasonable time these past few weeks (for much of the whole of first term as well), and it's something that needs sorting out. My housemate, Geoff, is in the same boat as well. Neither of us are out of our bedrooms until about lunchtime and the pair of us have decided we have had enough of it.

So last night we decided we'd both get up 8'oclock this morning. The deal was that we'd both try to get up at 8 and if the other one wasn't up we'd go bang on their door to wake them. We made this pact together sometime after midnight last night before we sat down to watch two films that didn't finish until three thirty in the morning. We then both agreed that perhaps we should set our alarms for 9 o'clock instead. Yes 9o'clock meant we'd be getting up a little later than our agreed 8'oclock, but 9 was still a good time to get up. It would still be classified as the morning, or the breakfast period and after I had eaten and got myself cleaned up I would probably be ready to start working at 10.

I set the alarm on my phone for 9 o'clock feeling pretty positive about getting up at that time. But to ensure I wouldn't just turnover and put my alarm on snooze the minute it woke me up in the morning I put my phone on the other side of the room, which means I have to actually get out of my bed to turn it off. In theory this is a really good tactic for getting up, but I have done this loads already. In fact I do this most nights. And while it worked the first couple of times I did it, it doesn't work anymore.

The main problem I have with getting up in the morning, and the reason that this tactic with the alarm doesn't work anymore, is all to do with changing mindsets. The mindset I am in when I am going to bed and setting the alarm is a completely different mindset to when I wake up in the morning. In fact, I would say my early morning mindset is so much different to my evening mindset that I would argue that they are completely different people, with very different priorities. The morning persons priority is to get back to sleep. That seems to be its sole motivation. Nothing will keep him out of bed very long. Even when I need to go to the toilet he will hold on as long as he can until the seal is almost broken before pulling himself out of bed to relieve himself. And even when he's in the toilet, and in the process of relieveing himself, he will try to steal every little bit of sleep that he can. This is why men piss all over the toilet when they get up to go during the night. It's not because they can't aim (because they can), it's because they try to piss and sleep at the same time.

I could wake up and my bedroom could be on fire but my morning self will try to rationalise staying in bed for just "another minute" before he'll get out of bed to save himself. Because that's what happens when my alarm goes off in the morning. I grumpily get out of bed and push the "snooze" button, which I think should be banned off of all alarms. They are absolutely pointless. All it does is give you another 5 or 10 minutes in bed, so why don't you just program your alarm to wake you later? - Oh, because you were supposed to be up 5 or ten minutes earlier? So what has the snooze button done for your except make you late? That's its purpose. TO make you late.

Unless you fall for the same trick I used to when I would set my alarm for a little earlier than I needed, then I would use the snooze button to wake me up ten minutes later thus somehow giving me the illusion of having got a little extra time in bed. It's like I've got my own makeshift time traveling device. The alarm goes off, I push the snooze button, and hey presto! I get an extra ten minutes in bed.

The trouble is, at that time an extra ten minutes is not enough. I need hours, but I'll refuse to stop using the snooze button. I just keep the phone by my bed, sometimes clutched in my hand, pressing it every 10 minutes when it decides to go off, making an empty promise to myself that "I will get up the next time it goes off. The next time it beeps I will get up" - BEEP BEEP BEE-*CLICK* ... "The next time it goes off I will get up. The next time".

It's only now as I write about this that I realise that I've subjected myself to my own Sisyphean punishment (that bloke from Greek mythology who had to push a boulder up a hill for eternity). I found that this was even more true after a little bit of research on the origin of the snooze button (i know, i'm a nerd). Aparently it goes off every nine minutes, the reason for this being that it takes the average person 10 to 20 minutes asleep, which means it is actually designed to go off moments before you can go back to sleep. So for all those hours I spend pushing that button over and over I'm not sleeping I am torturing myself. I am stealing sleep from myself, and making all those hours spent in bed an even bigger waste of time because I'm awake the whole time!

So what happened this morning? With our great plan of waking each other up? What do you think happened? In some ways it was the stupidest plan we could ever have come up with. Two people who are unable to wake themselves up relying on the other to wake them up was never gonna work. My alarm went off, I put it on snooze and went back to bed thinking that Geoff would probably wake me up in the minute, and I imagine he probably thought something similar as well.

I'm sure it will work when we try doing it again tomorrow.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Why don't you take goes in waking each other up, the burden of someone else’s expectations is normally enough to get me out of bed, more so than my own expectations. How's the minor?