Day 017: Your Morning Snooze or Move Button
What you do in the first hour of the day sets the tone for how you approach the rest of your day. If you roll over and hit snooze, your subconscious self tells the rest of your self something about the day and your ability to handle it too. If you let this happen too often, that message start affecting how you look at yourself too!
The conscious message can range from, “I’m too tired. I just need five more minutes,” to “It can’t be morning already!” to something more sinister like, “Why can’t it be Friday again? I hate Mondays!” In every case though, your subconscious self whispers negativity into the first moments of your day.
Those subconscious thoughts tell you you’re incapable of starting at that particular moment. It tells you you did not get enough sleep, rest, or peace to meet the tasks ahead of you. It tells you to deny the truth of time. It tells you, you were created fro weekend instead of the dignity found in work.
We reach to snooze the alarm without considering these darker possibilities on a conscious level, but that does not mean your half awake-half asleep, groggy, mush morning brain is not absorbing it all.
Skip the Snooze to Live Not Ordinary
While you may consider your snooze button a morning necessity, I invite you to consider that the opposite is true. It could be that your snoozing slows you down and contributes to your morning fog. Those extra few minutes rob you of needed rest if you set your alarm early thanks to your plan to snooze it. Hitting the snooze even one time too many or losing track and having too many “accidental” snoozes will delay your start and cause you to rush. This compromises positive morning routines which would benefit your mind, soul, heart, and strength. What’s worse, is that repercussions of this stress often show up later in the day and affect others as well.
In the quest to Live, Not Ordinary, strive to do what is Good and that others will not. This begins from the very first moment of your day! I know how tempting it is to hit the snooze button a time or two or even three! In fact, I’m not 100% immune from it even now, but I do have some strategies that keep me from doing this too often!
Strategies for Starting Your Day off on a Positive Note!
Starting your day off on a positive note begins long before you lay your head on the pillow. Eating healthy, getting enough water, and getting fresh air and exercise the day before is essential to clean breathing and a healthy, tired body. Practicing daily prayer and meditation as well as ample gratitude, is vital to unwinding and allowing yourself to drift into dreamland unperturbed. These rest your heart and soul. Connecting with people both through reading books filled with wisdom and actually having real life conversations iprove your mental capacity and give you a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment as well as feelings of love and purpose. Getting up each morning is intrinsically tied to what you did the days, and even weeks, before.
Having a bedtime routine and sticking to a fairly regular bedtime also helps the body unwind and prepare for a good night’s sleep. Preparing the night before what you will do in those first few moments after waking is super helpful too.
Choose the prayer you will add to your morning routine and write it on an index card to keep by your bed. If you know you struggle getting out of bed, bring a non-fiction book to read first thing. Spend the time you would have spent snoozing, reading instead. By doing this, the first few minutes of your day will be spent improving your mind and learning things others don’t. What’s more, you will already know things you yourself didn’t know when you went to bed! That’s pretty amazing!
There are many ways to avoid hitting the snooze button and wasting ten more minutes of unproductive time. Do what works for you. Some days I do better than others accomplishing this Not Ordinary goal, but if I don’t at least acknowledge that it is a worthy goal and strive to make it happen, I know my default will kick in. My personal default destines me for comfort and sloth, both in the morning and then in the excuses I make later in the day without God’s Grace seeing me through each moment.
That’s what got me thinking about this post in the first place. After I’d decided to show God I was serious about becoming a Saint, and a great one, I became exhausted, I started hitting my alarm and skipping out on my entire morning routine! I also noticed how negativity swarmed around me. I’m not saying it is all because I hit the snooze button. I know it’s not. On the other and, maybe I can handle things better when rising and reading on the first alarm.
It’s certainly something to think about anyway!
God Bless…
Gratitude Journal – April 27, 2023
Thank you Lord for…
- My boy, C and his whipping me in War.
- The card game War. We haven’t played that in a LONG time and it was so much fun to do with him… even if I lost – THIS time!
- Blue Marion Rosary beads.
- Father M and his call and texts
- Mom for talking with me on the phone and just listening.
- Understanding more of the teacher retirement system.
- Hope to get out of _____________ 🙁
- My students and their parents.
- Knowing the truth when earlier today I had not.
- Time to get things done.
- B and K and their perfect texts on how to survive today and then how to respond. Thank you Lord for friends I love them both! 🙂