There’s no better time to start up on your New Year’s resolutions than long after the new year has already started. This week, I decided to get a jump on one resolution that taught me more about the philosophy of goal-setting than it did about my sleep habits.
Ever the night owl, I usually fall asleep past midnight and wake up as late as I can wake up while still having time to get ready or finish some last-minute reading. Though I enjoy the solitude of staying up late, I have always admired the quiet, bright and calm feeling that an early morning offers, as well as the satisfaction of a productive first part of the day.
My roommates and I often joke about my inability to get up early. Instead of continuing the bit, I decided that 2026 would be the year I commit to change. To do this, I wanted to conduct an experiment where I set my alarm for 7 a.m. every day for a week, in the hopes that I would learn how to get up early even if I had nothing to do. If you are hoping for a success story, this might not the article for you to be reading, but I still think that my trials taught me some important lessons worth sharing.
Day One
I woke to my alarm. Determined to get up despite having gone to bed around 3 a.m., I sat upright in my bed with my eyes closed so as to wake myself up slowly. Amid the effort to prevent myself from falling back asleep, I still drifted in and out of being fully awake, dream-like daydreams supplanting rational thought.
This technique proved to be rather unsuccessful, and I sat there for almost an hour before deciding it was time to get up and move to the couch. Somewhat comically, within that hour my roommate had woken up and gotten ready for work and left before I had made it out of my bed.
Finally dragging myself to the couch, I decided to sit down for a minute and enjoy the light of the morning coming in through our west-facing windows, which offered up a pretty view from our position on the hill of apartments. This decision proved to be disastrous, as I quickly fell right back asleep on the couch. By the time I woke up, I knew that the first day of the experiment had been unsuccessful. My lessons from the first day were mainly that if this was ever going to work, I needed to start going to bed much earlier than I was used to.
Day Two
Day two was far more successful than day one, likely due to the fact that I had a discussion to attend at 9 a.m. Following my 7 a.m. alarm I was able to drag myself out of bed by 7:30 and begin to get ready for class. I had time to eat breakfast, prepare a lunch and walk to my friend’s apartment to head over to campus together. Still, the looming 9 a.m. discussion meant that it still wasn’t the true self-motivated morning meditation that I was chasing.
Days Three to Seven
Here is where things began to go downhill. Though I had intended to see some gradual improvements throughout the experiment, the course of the remaining days did not live up to expectation.
On Friday, and for the coming days, I would wake up to my alarm but not get out of bed, instead falling between states of being awake and on the cusp of sleep until I had no choice but to get up. Though I wouldn’t say I ever really fell back asleep, it’s still a far cry from being able to say I started my day at seven. I will admit that I chose a busy week to implement this regimen and that not being able to sleep early severely undermined this experiment, but I began to wonder what other forces were at play.
Takeaways
To say I was disappointed at my results would be an understatement. Even on days when I returned home in the evenings feeling exhausted, I was still going to bed at two or three in the morning, creating a cycle where I wouldn’t burn through my energy until late the next day.
Perhaps I can attribute some of my struggles to procrastination. When I was tired and no longer able to focus on school work, I would lazily put off getting ready for bed but refuse to fall asleep on the couch, leading to wasted time scrolling or watching TV. Maybe I can trace procrastination back farther to general laziness or even burnout.
Whatever the reason, I refuse to let the results of my experiment set the tone for the rest of the year. So often we hear about resolutions that are abandoned after a few short days. But if resolutions were supposed to be easy, why would we be making them? Wouldn’t we have completed them a long time ago? My biggest error was that I thought there was a factory reset button for a habit I spent years developing.
Putting pressure on yourself to change so quickly is a surefire way to get discouraged. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that the “one-week” method for change is practice we can leave behind in 2026. Resolutions are as much about reaching your end goal as they are discovering what was holding you back along the way.
I discovered that if I make self care a priority instead of an afterthought, it’s a pleasure and not a chore, and that I should believe my mom when she says its not good to wake up at noon.
