Day 1

Yesterday, I read an article on cracked.com (I love their articles, by the way - informative and witty) where it covered various ways that our brains prevent us from breaking bad habits or starting new ones. One of the more interesting pieces of information to come out of that article was something measurable: 66 days. I don't know what it is about 66 days that allows someone to start or stop a habit, but I worked out the numbers and that comes out to right around the 1st of December from here. I thought about my various habits and what I would want to break and I came up with something that has plagued me for years, and gotten me into quite a bit of trouble. That would be oversleeping.

You know how this scenario goes, whether with you or someone you know. The alarm goes off. ou hit the snooze and keep sleeping. That's the purpose of the snooze button. I take this to an epic level. I can snooze an alarm clock for more than an hour before finally getting out of bed. I'll even ignore the buzzing of the alarm clock for a time before even responding to it. We all have habits to break, but I think this, for me, is the biggest one. If I could get a handle on, specifically, waking up with the alarm clock, I would be a better person for it.

So this morning is day one. The night was rough to begin with since there was a storm, and our scardy-cat 70 pound lab-german shepherd was whimpering all night due to the thunder. This made me wake up multiple times during the night, but my criteria is to awaken when the alarm clock goes off, rather than responding to the whimpering. I'm not sure if I succeeded or not. I have a blur of a memory where I might have snoozed it once, but it's not certain. Again, rough night.

So I got up with it, to the best of my recollection, and rather than snoozing it, I just turned it off. This act has served before to force me to stay up, so I figured I'd employ it now. It took me probably thirty minutes before my mind reached a decent cognitive state, which is fine in this early stage. My brain wanted nothing more than to go right back to bed. It tried. Oh, how it tried. But I prevailed today. Only 65 days to go before it should be a new habit.

I just have to make sure to kill the alarm for Saturday morning. Even one day's slip can ruin the entire process according to the article, so if I forget to unset the alarm for Saturday morning, I will have to wake up bright and early Saturday.

I also figured another habit that would be decent is writing on this blog, and since I'm endeavoring to get up earlier, I thought I'd type to give myself something firm to do. Here we go.