New Goal: Wake Up Early

So, recently I saw a video on YouTube about the benefits of waking up at 5 am every day.  Now, I haven't woken up before 6:30 am since the time I was in seminary.  Most of the time I spent going to college was spent with my alarm sounding at 6:30 am and actually getting out of bed and beginning my day around 7:30.  Some days I slept in until almost 10 or 11 am, especially if I was out with friends the previous night, or needed to catch up on sleep.

A couple of moves later and living in a new state, the current work/life balance has yielded an ever changing sleep schedule.  This biorhythm has begun to introduce a chaos, stress, and fatigue into a cycle that functioned well and previously provided me with a healthy lifestyle where I was able to get things done.  At current, it seems like I don't get anything done, and my routine clothes itself in appearance of disorder and slothfulness.  Sometimes, when I begin winding down before bed I find myself thinking to myself, "I didn't get anything done today and now I have to push my tasks to the next day."  Needless to say I rarely find within myself a sense of accomplishment at the end of my day.

Well, I've decided to change that!

So beginning tomorrow morning I will be beginning an experiment to restore what was stereotype to my biorhythm.  This experiment will cover the better part of the month to resurrect the habit of a regular bed time and wake time.  The process will not yield perfection overnight.  Any sort of change in habit - especially when a bad habit has developed - takes time.  It is said that to develop a new habit takes at least 27 days, or on average one month.

It'll take some altering of a few bad habits I have developed.  Some important things that I've already been working on with some success, which have greatly helped me prepare for the experiment:

• No phone use for at least 30 minutes before bed
• Establish a procedural pre-bedtime sequence so that the body eventually learns that it's time to get to sleep.
• When the alarm sounds in the morning hitting the snooze < 5 times (still bad at this!)
• Establishing an unalterable sequential morning routine

It's been hard as a parent establishing a consistent routine for myself, but I think it needs to happen.  I remind myself that there will come a time when I will expect a routine from my daughter, and any other children I may have, thus it's important that I establish a routine so that the example is already set and ready to be imitated.

The best benefit to redeveloping a routine is that I will have more time for those things I want to do that aren't important.  Things like reading, blogging, catching up with friends will become much less difficult and more things that I just have time to do.  I think that's the ultimate and best benefit of all!