Quit Hitting the Snooze Button
I’ve never been a morning person. When I was a kid and stayed overnight at my grandparents’ farm in Iowa, I remember watching my Grandpa get up before daybreak, completing hours of work before the rest of the world even thought about waking up for the day. In college, I’d often stay up all night long, cramming for an exam or partying until the wee hours of the morning. Even as an adult, I often stay up well past midnight, catching up on work from the day or zoning out while watching new episodes of Vanderpump Rules because, as a small business owner, mom, and wife, there just isn’t enough freaking time in the day.
I can’t tell you how many times I have attempted to change this dynamic as an adult. Honestly, it does bother me a little bit. I hear how various friends and family members wake up at 5 am every day, and even my husband is a morning person. He wakes up at 6 am every day to work out, make coffee, shower, and get out the door by 7 am for work. But not me. I can’t do this. Trust me, I’ve tried. I can muster it for a few measly days, and then I’m right back to the midnight game. I think I’m just built as a night person, doing some of my best work and self-care in the dark. The phrase, “the early bird gets the worm,” has always made me cringe. I mean, I get plenty of worms at 1 am. Dozens of client projects and countless episodes of watching Tom Sandoval’s cringy worm mustache making its way through California have been conquered during that euphoric timeframe.
Now, being a night person also comes with its downfalls. It means that I regularly hit the snooze button in the morning because I stay up too late and am so damn tired that by the time the alarm does go off, I can never get up on the first one. Sometimes, it’s the second alarm that steals me from my comfy slumber, but usually, it’s the third. You know, the whole “third time’s a charm” kinda dealio. Or something like that. It also means that I rarely feel well-rested. I know I gotta work on this one, and for good reason. Because here’s what happens: when I continually hit the snooze button and think that those extra 10 minutes of sleep are going to really recharge me for the day ahead, it’s ridiculous. Hitting a 10-minute alarm and attempting to fall back asleep, only to hear it beeping at me again so soon, and knowing that I’ll never fall that quickly back into a REM cycle, quite frankly, pisses me right off. Stupid alarm. Had I just gotten up when it first went off, I would surely be in a better mood and headspace. I would have been up on time without being rushed to wherever we needed to be, the house would likely not look nearly as disastrous, and I could even maybe do my makeup in the bathroom mirror instead of slapping it on in the car between stoplights.
This is the exact predicament I often find myself in life when I know my internal alarm bells are going off, telling me I need to slow down, take some time to myself to just breathe, take a shower, escape for a girl’s night out, or a date night with my hubby. You know what I’m talking about here: the moment you feel like the walls are closing in on you, life becomes too much to bear, and you most definitely will lose your sh*t at any moment. Your patience has left the building and has no intention of coming back, and your people look at you with big, wide eyes because they can tell that you have reached your breaking point, wondering what losing your sh*t is gonna look like today. This happens to everyone at one point or another, and for me, it’s usually once every couple of months or so. It looks different for everybody, and depending on your coping mechanisms, it can last a while, or if you listen intently to the alarm, it may be shorter-lived. My internal alarm bells come in the form of this phrase ringing in my own head. “I can’t take this anymore. I am going to explode or drive myself off a cliff.” Now, let me be clear: I don’t actually want to drive myself off a cliff; it’s simply how my body and brain communicate with me in an effort to tell me that I have to slow down or I won’t be able to continue doing what I want and need to do in my life. It’s my cue that I gotta put the car in park, reassess, relax, and reset.
Now, just as I have created the bad habit of hitting the snooze button on my alarm clock, I have also become notorious for hitting snooze when my internal alarm bells are going off, telling me that I need to slow down and take care of myself. I can almost always feel it when I’m getting close to it happening again, but even when I know I need to take that first internal alarm seriously, I often brush it off, hit the snooze button, and continue burning the candle at both ends. Writing it down on paper and reading it out loud now seems so ridiculous. It should be easy for me to heed the warnings my body alerts me to and do what I need to do to take care of myself, but I don’t because I am a woman. I am a mom. And a wife. And a business owner. People are counting on me. People pay me to do a job. My kids need me to survive. If I slow down or shut the world out, then things will really fall apart. Right? Perhaps.
Here’s what happens, though, if I don’t heed the warnings: things do, in fact, fall apart. I fall apart. I just spent the past month in a deep depression, sick and exhausted, because I figuratively and literally ran myself into the ground. I did not heed my internal alarm bells. I kept hitting the snooze button when they started blaring until it got to a point where I needed an entire month to get back on my feet. I wasn’t getting enough sleep, I was crabby, I was eating food that was not good for me, my schedule was packed from the second I woke up to the minute my head hit the pillow, and my writer’s block was at an all-time high. I felt rushed, unsettled, and behind. In order to combat that unhealthy mix of ridiculousness, I drank way too much coffee and eventually crashed when the sugar and caffeine wore off. I kept telling myself that I was fine and that I could do it all, even when my internal alarm bells were ringing so loudly that I couldn’t hear anything over them. Not a good mix. I was also in a space where my basic needs were dead last on my list of priorities. Everyone and everything else came first. I’m realizing that is not a sustainable way to live, and even though I’ve heard the idea of “putting my oxygen mask on first before I help anyone else,” I’ve never been very good at putting myself first. I’ve also never been good at setting healthy boundaries for myself, but I spent a lot of time on this recent spring break trip thinking about the types of boundaries I need to put in place for myself so I don’t allow myself to get this far gone again.
All that said, we also live in a society that tends to believe if we aren’t on our A-game every day, then we are failing. A “hustle culture,” as some call it. We are expected to be available 24/7 and to be at our best every single day. And if it isn’t grossly obvious already, it’s asinine to believe that we should hold ourselves to that unattainable standard, and quite frankly, I think that standard is making a lot of us sick and tired. Newsflash: nobody in the world is able to give 150% every day. Some days, I can give 150%, and some days, I can only give 4%. On those 4% days, I have often found myself internally beating myself up about not being able to give 150%, and maybe you’ve found yourself doing the same. The aftermath of that thinking is that I spend the entire time tormenting myself about the fact that I don’t have the time to rest, which means my brain and body are unable to actually take that time to recharge. Those negative thoughts take away from the fact that I need to rest, so when the next day comes, I don’t feel any better - and sometimes, I feel even worse.
So, that brings me to the idea of self-care, which I struggle a bit with because it’s so ambiguous, and it also wildly differs from person to person. So, how does self-care work for someone like me? Honestly, I have no idea yet. I’m 41 years old, and I still haven’t quite figured it out, but here is what I do know: when my internal alarm bells start ringing and tell me that I’m doing too much, I have to listen to the first one and take action to remedy where I’m at. I cannot keep hitting the snooze button because I never want to fall into this deep, dark place ever again. I have to do a better job of carving out time on my calendar for myself and not schedule over it because it’s better for someone else. And, at minimum, I have to take care of my own basic needs. Put simply, the more I give of myself to others, the less I am able to give myself.
