To sleep or not to sleep...

...that's the question I'm dealing with right now. Spurred on by some tips in this article, I've been attempting to alter my poor sleep habits for about a week now. The gist of the article is that if you wake up at the same time every morning and listen to your body at night, you'll be able to know when you need to go to sleep to get up at that early hour every day. I know, it sounds a little backwards, but there is some truth there.

I have a natural tendency to hit that snooze button over and over again until I'm running late every day. Back when I worked at this job, I ended up getting a warning or two about tardiness. Granted, they were overly strict about every spare minute, but it was still my responsibility to show up on time. I was always on the jagged edge of lateness due to that snooze button.

Once, after hanging out with a Surfer/Pastor/Poet friend of mine from Panama City Beach, I was inspired and attempted to write a little poem. It ended up being a silly little thing about how jarring and evil an alarm clock is. No, I don't remember the words, I only remember that it was a pretty poor excuse for poetry. But it was significant to me in that the only poem I've ever written was about how much I hate alarm clocks.

Getting back to the point, I've been at this endeavor for a week now. My goal was 6:30am, wake up, work out, have breakfast with my wife, and take a shower. I would have even settled for 7:00am if I was really tired.

It worked great on Day One. I was even at work on time.

Day Two - slept in a little, but was up before my normal time. I had forgotten to iron a shirt the night before, however, so I actually ended up being late for work again.

Day Three - back to my old habit.

Day Four was Saturday. I slept in until 9:00am. Not looking good so far.

Day Five was Sunday, and I always get up at 6:30am anyway, because I have to be at church so early. I got up at 6:38am. (That's equivalent to one extra snooze button time period, or as I like to call it, one "Snooze Unit".)

Day Six was today. Unfortunately, I had some pretty bad nightmares last night (which I never have), so I didn't sleep well. I was so tired, I don't even remember getting out of bed this morning. But I did get out of bed...even later than normal.

Day Seven is tomorrow, and I'm blogging this at midnight. This is a lot harder than I thought it would be.