By Kristin Backert

It’s somehow already November, which can only mean one thing: tiredness. Pure, pure, pure exhaustion. It gets darker so much earlier, the weather is getting colder, the best holiday (aka Halloween) has come and gone…sigh. 

When my alarm rings in the morning, it takes everything I have not to just throw it against the wall and go right back to sleep and ignore the day. I know that once I get out of bed, I can go through the steps in my morning routine with minimal problems. But the mere thought of leaving my toasty bed? While it’s still dark out? When I’m ridiculously comfortable? Ugh. When my alarm goes off, I devise every possible reason to stay in bed for as long as I feasibly can. You actually woke up on time, so you deserve another five minutes of rest; just count to sixty a few times and nothing can go wrong. You have a long day ahead of you, so you should stay here a little longer so that you have more energy. It’s a Monday; be a Garfield and stay in bed. The list of reasons goes on. And even though I know that staying in bed means that I’ll have to rush, the motivation to throw off the covers and embrace the cold is simply not there.

I’m not sure that it’s possible to feel excited about waking up early in the dark, but lately, I’ve tried hard to make mornings feel less soul-crushing. For example, instead of counting to sixty (because I either fall back asleep or tell myself I should just re-start the counting), I’ll think about my go-to breakfast — Marshmallow Fruit Loops. Sugary? Absolutely. Appropriate for an adult? Perhaps. Able to nudge me out of bed? A bit, but every little bit helps, especially since hunger tends to be a decent motivator to getting me to move. In addition, I’ve recently started to try and force my brain to wake up when the alarm goes off. Do you know what it’s like to do the Wordle when you’re half-asleep? It’s not fun at first, but the challenge helps to wake me up because I absolutely hate losing when it comes to this game. And before I know it, I’m awake enough that the rational side of my brain says to get out of bed and start the day. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s working so far.

I think that a lot of morning routine success comes down to trial and error. Maybe something works well one day but not the other; now you need to figure out why there’s an inconsistency. Maybe I’ll try a new method today and mostly like it, and I’ll adjust it slightly for tomorrow. One of my students, for example, found that putting his phone (which functioned as his alarm) on his desk wasn’t helpful because he’d shut it off and then go straight back to bed. He had more success placing the phone in his bathroom because it not only forced him out of bed, it forced him to enter a totally new room. When he went into the bathroom to shut the alarm off, his brain basically went, “Well, I’m in here now, so we might as well shower and start the day.” There’s no perfect system out there, so we’ve all got to figure out what works best for us.

Even though these mornings are cold and dark, we can get through them together! What methods have helped to get you out of bed during these November days?