The Snooze Button

Getting to the root of a problem

I love coffee, and I love sleep.

My husband jokes that as soon as I lay on a pillow, I’m out cold for 8-10 hours. I can also drink coffee at 7pm and still fall asleep no problem. It’s a blessing and a curse when you have a job that requires you to be fully alert before the crack of dawn.

For 2025, I have all these intentions of following a calm morning routine, writing routine, and night routine. But after reflecting on it by mentally tracing my steps through each routine, one thing really stood in my way.

The Snooze Button.

My fucking nemesis.

For the past 25 years, waking up at 5 a.m. to teach high school English at 7:30 has been painful and elusive. Each morning, I’d hit that lovely, convenient friend on my glowing phone screen—Snooze—over and over and over again until in a panic I would jump out of bed at the last minute, blood pounding in my temples, put on whatever clothes were clean enough and not too wrinkled, wrap my hair in a messy bun, and run out the door—no breakfast, no coffee, no lunch, no plan other than to grab something on the drive and get to my classroom by 7:15 to set up.

As a veteran English teacher, this is completely possible. I know what I’m doing. My classes are prepped with organized systems in place. I’ve convinced myself over the years that the only thing I needed in my mornings was more sleep to be happy.

After some soul searching, I decided if this was the year to root out foundational issues, I had to break up with the SNOOZE button in order to fit in a morning routine.

First, I removed the button from my alarm screen. (Yes, this is easy to do. Why didn’t I do it sooner?) Then, my reward. If I wake up at 5 am, I get to relax in my fuzzy bathrobe, enjoy coffee and breakfast at home, and watch my favorite garden shows for 45 glorious minutes, allowing myself to wake up slowly like I love to do on weekends. Basically, I earn a quiet, slow morning caring about myself.

It’s been 10 workdays without hitting SNOOZE.

This is what happened.

Days 1-3: I woke up thinking, “No! Already? You gotta be kidding me…”
I wanted to chuck my phone across the room but warned myself, “You promised!”

“Fine,” I thought. “Whatever.”

I stumbled in the dark and wrapped myself in my fuzzy bathrobe for comfort.

An undercurrent of rage erupted from me, like a latent volcano that I had been appeasing for years. By hitting snooze, I had been stuffing that rage into my subconscious dream state and letting it fester into chaos and stress in my waking life. But by not hitting snooze, it unleashed.

I thought, “Why is the entire educational system out to get me? Why did I pick a career at age 18 that would start before the crack of dawn? Why am I so tired and broke after so many years of giving my all to students? They don’t care anyway. No one cares. Why should I sacrifice more on top of it? Why do I always come last? Why is it all so damn unfair?”

Then I sat in the living room and watched YouTube garden shows on TV, had coffee and breakfast.

And then, something magical happened.

The rage…released.

As I allowed myself to slowly wake up, a sense of peace and energy began to flow through me, the energy that I usually only have on weekends. I got dressed in a much cuter outfit. Several people at work even complimented me more.

Hmm…

Day 4: I fell asleep on the couch watching garden shows, then woke up in a panic that I was late for work. Thankfully, only 10 minutes had gone by. The last thing I wanted to do was replace rage with anxiety, so I set two more alarms with different ring tones, one that signaled when it was time to get dressed, and one that signaled when it was time to leave the house.

Day 5: I woke up, grabbed my robe, washed my face, and no longer felt any rage or pressure to scramble.

What is this version of my life?

Now on Day 10: The rage is gone. Some days I’m more tired than others, and a little sad that I can’t sleep in, but my muscles feel less tense. I also haven’t spent money on coffee shop breakfasts in two weeks. I am falling asleep at night earlier, which kind of sucks, but overall, a major improvement.

It’s funny how sometimes to make a major change, you only need to figure out the SABOTAGE BUTTON moment.

What is one small thing that creates a negative domino effect in your life?

What reward system could you create that is more powerful than your sabotage button?

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