What else happens when we hit the snooze button?

I have a personal vendetta against the snooze button. If you are a snoozer, this is not a personal attack, instead, it's a spotlight on what I see happening when guys snooze and why you’re better off not hitting it long-term.

Sleep

When we hit the snooze button, we are ultimately giving up better quality sleep for dozing. Depending on how many times and for how long a snooze lasts, we aren’t actually getting restful or restorative sleep. We’re getting the same first phase of sleep over and over again, and though that is important, it’s not the same as complete sleep. Imagine wanting to win a 100m race by running the first 10 meters, then returning to the starting blocks and repeating this over and over 10x. You’d run the full 100m, but you’d never win.

Inertia

Have you ever taken a nap and woke up feeling worse or really groggy? This is a form of sleep inertia and essentially means we have woken up in the middle of a downward sleep cycle that was dropping us into a deep sleep and we’ve just had to try and climb out of it. If you’re waking yourself up in the middle of a downward sleep cycle over and over you’re likely to feel more tired than if you just got up at the first alarm.

Setting the tone

I believe snoozing sets the tone for the day. As we went to bed the night before, we set the alarm with the intention of getting up and beginning our day at that time. We planned to take action on the important things in our lives like working out, eating a nutritious breakfast, reading our book, or getting a head start on our work for the day. Whatever it was that we planned to do with good intentions the night before, we are now reneging on in favor of a comfortable chill under the cozy covers. That’s not the kind of precedent we want to set if our goal is progress.

Priorities

If you’re like the guys we work with at builtXyou, your waking hours are spoken for with your commute, team meetings, packed work days, client dinners, weekend workshops, family vacations, kids basketball tournaments, and business travel amongst other things. If you snooze, these things still need to get done. The thing that has the most riding on it immediately will almost always win out. You’ve got to go to work, you can’t skip the meetings, you can’t miss the basketball game etc. this means that the things that get cut are the things with the lowest immediate impact and thats your health and fitness.

Pressure

Snoozing uses up the time we had allotted to something else. If you allot this time to snooze, I would recommend using the time more effectively by either sleeping more, or getting up and doing something that adds to your life like working out, reading, eating breakfast, time outdoors etc. Snoozing compresses our day adding pressure to things that were previously manageable. This is ultimately time management and I can’t think of a healthy guy who isn’t adept at managing their time.

Self-confidence

When we renege on the things we said we would, we chip away at the trust we have in ourselves. If we can’t trust ourselves to do the things we said we would and act inline with the things we say we value (your health and fitness are intertwined in everything in your life…everything). Lack of trust in ourselves erodes our self confidence and that perpetuates itself in our work, home life, and relationships.

Tired of being tired all the time?

Be impeccable with your word by doing the things you said you would when you said you’d do them.

If you’re a snoozer and it works for you, awesome. These are my opinions. If however, you’re a snoozer and you know you could be getting more from your efforts or that you’re suffering from any of the cons I noted above then you could benefit from working with our expert coaches.

If you know you need guidance and support to create a plan that lays out the highest impact actions to get transformative health, fitness, and physique results so that you can live the life you want then apply to one of our programs below.