Winter is the time of year that the snooze button on your alarm clock can wreck havoc with your mood. Just as waking up early and getting light and exercise is the fastest way to improve depression, trying to sleep in, or lying in bed thinking about why you don’t want to get up, is the best way to make you feel worse.
Of course, it doesn’t seem that way when you are in bed and your brain tells you – “you are tired, you need more sleep,” but in fact that poor quality sleep is going to make you feel more tired, not less.
Over the years we have learned the hard way that feeling tired is much more strongly correlated with sleeping too much than with not sleeping enough. In fact people can do pretty well on 6 and a half or 7 hours of sleep a night (that may not be ideal, but it is much better than 8 and half or 9 hours of sleep).
What some of us need is an alarm clock that won’t take “no” for an answer. This is why we occasionally tell one of the people we are working with that they might want to consider buying Clocky – an alarm clock that runs away from you if you are sleeping too long and won’t let you turn it off.
As an alternative, before you go to sleep get your clothes out, and visualize getting up and putting on clothes, or sweat pants, or getting a cup of coffee without thinking about whether to do it or not. That should help you get up and out of bed.