Getting sleep can be easy with discipline

You slowly blink back heavy lids, taking that first deep breath of the morning, reach for your phone and check the time on your lock screen. You jerk out of bed, throwing off the covers and making a beeline for the bathroom. You slept through all your alarms again, and you have class in five minutes. 

Sleeping in is tempting, hitting the snooze button over and over then getting ready in a flurry of movement. But having an alarm go off every ten minutes can be detrimental to your sleep quality and your alertness through the rest of the day. Rafael Pelayo, MD, a sleep specialist at the Stanford University Sleep Medicine Center bares the truth of why snoozing is bad for us. 

Not getting up after an alarm confuses your body. By sleeping in after an alarm you are telling your body that it doesn’t need to get up, and doing this multiple times makes it even harder to get up when you really need to. You are basically crying wolf every time you snooze you alarm so your body doesn’t believe you when you actually need to get up. 

Sleeping past your usual wake up time can also throw your all-important circadian rhythm out of whack. That means it can be even harder to get up for tomorrow’s 8 a.m. class if you sleep in till 9 a.m. today. By not consistently getting up and going to bed at the same times throughout the week, you confuse your sleep/wake cycle and can’t get to sleep or get up as easily. 

Binge watching is no substitute for sleep. Call it a night at roughly the same time each day, Bones will still be there in the morning (after homework, of course). Instead of setting early alarms you know you’ll never wake up to, only set one when you need to get up every day. To ensure waking up to your alarms, consider changing your alarm sound to something new that you haven’t gotten used to. Prepare as much as possible in the evening—pack a lunch, prep your clothes, put you books in your bag, you know the drill—and sleep in that saved time. 

We don’t all bounce out of bed every morning, but with a little discipline, we can be a little brighter and have time to brush through our bushy tails in the morning.