Disabling the Snooze

View fullsize

After shutting off both alarms yesterday and waking up a whole hour later than I intended to (hence no morning routine or blog post), I decided I had to take more preventative steps last night, the most punishing of which was to disable the snooze button. That's right. I don't even have the option, in my zombie-like state, to even have the opportunity to press the wrong button.

I took other preventative measures as well: I added a backup alarm at 5:45, increased the volume of the now three alarms, and selected more grating sounds for each intrusion into my slumber.

If this doesn't work, I might need to arrange for a whole marching band to enter my bedroom before sunrise. I can keep making all of these extreme efforts, or I could, as some have proposed, just go to bed earlier. If only it were that simple ...

Actually, it probably should be that simple, but I (stubborn as I may or may not be), just won't accept that solution. Or maybe I will. If I were to go to bed earlier, I would miss out on precious reading or Jacob time (though not in that order!). We usually eat dinner around 7:30 or 8 when he comes home, and then watch Jeopardy!, and then he either goes to the gym or watches college basketball (or professional baseball, or tennis, depending on the season), at which point I get back to work on planning, grading, or imagining cool things to teach that I'll never have time for, or I just wilf around.

Does this mean that we have to change our ENTIRE routine? I like this new morning routine, albeit I like it better without the morning part, and I like my introverted time at night to read, and I want to also, ideally, see my husband.

As a sidenote, I've been hearing about this concept called "decision fatigue" lately, the idea being that the more decisions you make, the harder it gets to make decisions. (I'm sure that's an oversimplification, but it will have to do for now.) And when I think about all the decisions I have to make in a day as a teacher, all the decisions that I have to make so very quickly and that are so very significant, well, it's no wonder that 1) I like to make slow, methodical decisions when I can, and 2) I am worn out of making sound decisions by the end of the day (or, as we now know, in the morning).

Disabling the snooze means that I'm denying myself the autonomy I crave. I guess for now I have to concede that doing so gives me more of what I want even more--time to write in the morning and time to read or work in the evening, and then time to read again just before bed--so much so that it's worth it to disable the alarm, rendering me powerless to its early siren call and eliminating my choice to make a poor decision when I'm barely awake.

I think I might have just talked myself into this whole morning thing. Yawn.