It has always been a struggle for me to wake up in the morning. Though the smell of pancakes and bacon is tempting, the bed has always won the clash. The light shining through the blinds like the sun although silent is pleading for me to start my day — again tempting — but to no avail. I have so many alarms set in the morning that I swear everyone else in my house hears them but me. The snooze button is an old friend of mine. One of my biggest problems seems to follow me for only the first 30 minutes of my being awake. The grogginess chases after me until something just clicks in me and suddenly it whisks away — like it was never there to begin with. A never-ending cycle, morning after morning, battling with the notion that another 20 minutes wouldn’t hurt.
— Kalea, Union Highschool/Vancouver Wa
Wake Up Call
I’m definitely not a morning person. As such, waking up in the morning can be difficult, but it’s hard not to do with my mom around. She has somehow managed to perfect the art of getting me and my sister to wake up. First, she has to make staying in bed less comfortable. If it’s too comfortable I’ll never get up. So she comes into my room announcing it’s time to wake up, turning on my light and turning off my fan. Seems simple enough, but I rarely wake up to this step alone. So, around five to ten minutes later, I can expect to receive a text asking if I am awake yet. If I do not respond, that tells her I’m still asleep. I will then receive a phone call. As someone who sleeps with their phone next to their pillow, that is pretty hard to sleep through. This will usually wake me up. However, she’ll still send texts, periodically giving minute warnings about how long we have until we have to leave for school or work. It’s become so routine that if she misses a text, my sister will send it before her just for fun. Though on the weekends, I just sleep until noon.
Every morning at exactly six o’clock I slam my hand down against my phone screen. Trying to make the aggravating noise stop before my ears bleed out. I roll over and drift back to sleep in complete comfort. After a couple minutes the aggravation returns and by this point in time I’ve had enough. I turn my alarm off, throw my phone across the room, and roll back over in my heavenly bed. A little while passed and I’m disturbed once again, but this time by my parents. Either my mom or dad comes into my room and tells me I need to get up. I shrug them away and tell them I’m up, which is obviously a lie. I go back to sleep. The next time they come into my room they aren’t so happy. They scream at me until I’m forced out of bed. I groggily walk out of my room and through the house getting ready, making no interactions with anyone. This leaves me little to no time to get ready. I brush my teeth, throw on some sweats, and head out the door. Once I’m in the toasty car and have my luscious seat warmers on, I struggle to keep my eyes open. So, of course, I drift back into slumber until we tragically get to school.
My sister wakes me up around 6:30 (it takes her a lot of tries to do so) for morning prayer and it takes me like 20 minutes to finish my prayer reading the Quran … I don’t need an alarm because my sister is my alarm. She is annoying and she won’t let me sleep, either.
Getting Out of Bed
I start every morning with the same dreaded, incessant noise meaning I have to get out of my warm bed and into the cold morning. Though I try to avoid hitting the snooze button, if I do, then I am more at risk of falling back asleep because I am not normally the type to jump right out of bed. Therefore, especially during wintertime, I delay as long as possible because I want to stay in a warm cocoon … I notice that when I wake up later and jump out of bed immediately, I feel more alert but consciously more like I am not ready to start my day yet, whereas when I stall with the snooze button, I feel more tired and less cognitively alert.
