Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
- Having a poor sleep schedule is exceedingly common and detrimental to health.
- Waking up early is associated with marked reductions in depression, and waking up consistently each day is associated with significant decreases in anxiety.
- Especially if you are a worker who thrives in quietude, waking up early is the perfect way to establish a peaceful and quiet work environment in which you can flourish.
Snooze! That is the button most people hit — or must resist the strong urge to hit — upon hearing their alarm first thing in the morning before getting ready to start their work day. But is hitting the snooze button a good idea?
Research shows that hitting the snooze button instead of waking up to your initial alarm can have some significant health effects, such as increasing the chance of waking up repeatedly while sleeping and reducing sleep quality. This makes chronic grogginess much more likely.
This is because hitting the snooze button on your alarm interrupts the REM portion of your sleep cycle, making it so you dream less and that this crucial portion of your time asleep does not fulfill its functional potential, leading to adverse side effects like poor focus.
So what is the cure to chronic grogginess? The start is to no longer hit the snooze button upon waking from your first alarm.
To do this, making sleep hygiene a priority is a crucial first step — if sleep hygiene were a priority, you would not feel the need to hit “snooze” because you’d feel well-rested. Only those who are not well-rested hit snooze each morning.
Waking up early can help fix your sleep schedule, improving multiple health markers
Having a poor sleep schedule — defined as waking up and going to bed at sporadic times each day and night, as opposed to within the same 1–3 hour window in the morning and evening — is exceedingly common and profoundly detrimental to our health.
Researchers show that a poor sleep schedule increases the odds of developing a neurodegenerative disease. That is to say, poor sleep hygiene is an early treatable risk factor for conditions like dementia.
One of the best ways to mitigate this severe risk factor is by waking up and going to sleep early. More important in fixing our sleep schedule is waking up early — which is much easier than going to sleep early for most people.
Waking up early will help you fall asleep earlier because doing so will help to reset your circadian rhythm, or your body’s internal time clock that tells your body when to be awake and when to go to sleep.
If your body is always up early, your body will begin to tell you that by making you tired more often at earlier times.
Waking up early is associated with marked reductions in depression, and waking up consistently each day is associated with significant decreases in anxiety. In other words, waking up early is associated with being happier and healthier.
Waking up early can make you more successful
Of the most famous success stories, the most impressive examples include individuals who wake up early, such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Mike Tyson and Arnold Schwarzenegger,.
How is waking up early connected to success? First and foremost, waking up early in the morning will, in most cases, allow one to wake up in an environment without distractions, because no one else is awake and around to distract you.
Especially if you are a worker who thrives in quietude, waking up early is the perfect way to establish a peaceful and quiet work environment in which you can flourish. Likewise, if you are into exercise, waking up early is the ideal way to fit that in — way less people are in the gym at 5:00 or 6:00 a.m.
You will not feel rushed to work when you wake up early in the morning. Early birds have more control over their time and often show up to work before everyone else, earning their peers and managers’ trust and respect.
Besides that, being happier and healthier makes work more manageable, and if work is less stressful, you will be a more productive worker.
Work feels terrible when we feel bad. If we take the proper precautions with our bodily and mental health (which go hand-in-hand) work can come to feel good. Sleep is integral to this process, and waking up early is an excellent way of facilitating it.
