A Change of Habit

Sleep. I have no trouble sleeping. It is the waking up part that can be a challenge.

When I work, I give myself a few hours to putter away before I must leave the house. I like to have time to read, write, email, have my morning smoothie and a few cups of coffee. Two hours gives me ample time to do all of the above.

I slipped into the habit of sleeping in a little bit over the holidays. I was certain that I would undo that bad habit once the holidays were over. But not starting my work day until 12:45 p.m. made it seem pretty silly to get up at 5:30. So I fell into the habit of getting up at 6:30 or so.

Yesterday I dragged myself out of bed at 7:00. The phone rang at 7:08 and I was asked to go into work. I was out the door by 7:45. It was time to get myself back into my regular waking routine.

Prior to yesterday, I wondered how hard it would be to slip back into the 5:30 habit.

I am scheduled to work at 8:00 this morning. Did I have trouble getting up at my usual time? No.

In fact, I woke up at 4:08. That was far too early to get up and stay up. So I wandered back to bed and turned on my sleeping pill (the TV) and set the sleep timer on the TV for an hour. I drifted back into a light slumber and then my alarm started going off.

I have a terribly confusing time zone in my room. Every time the power goes off, my clock has a battery so it doesn't lose the time when the power goes back on. But ... it gains a few minutes each time there is a power outage and it resets the clock to the wrong time.

At one point in time my clock was 18 minutes fast, so instead of correcting the time, I set the alarm to go off at 5:48 so that it was really going off at 5:30 (are you confused yet?). Then our area of the city had a massive amount of power outages in a short period of time so this messed up my math a little, but I basically 'knew' that I had about ten minutes of 'snooze' time after my alarm went off and the rest of the world caught up to my 5:30 wake-up call.

This morning, I honestly had no idea how fast my clock was. I hit the snooze button twice and that took me to 5:30.

So ... my clock used to be 18 minutes fast. So I adjusted the alarm to reflect that. Now ... I must hit the snooze button twice to get up at the proper time.

Some people may reset the clock and alarm to reflect the correct time. To be honest, I am a little bit afraid to do that because I have grown accustomed to the fact that my clock is usually 15 to 30 minutes fast (I just checked and my clock is presently 45 minutes ahead of schedule).

Knowing that I had to go to work this morning made it very easy to fall back into my old habits. I could have gotten up earlier. My brain is already kicking into gear well before I get out of bed as I try to do the mental math, to figure out the actual time.

The problem is ... I have been up for an hour and a half and I'm still trying to figure out what time zone my bedroom is in.

** I hate to admit how long it has taken me to write this inane post. Suffice to say ... I could have slept in until 6:30 this morning and saved anyone the trouble of reading this! **