Whether you woke up to an hour more of sleep on Sunday, if you got to stay at the bar an extra hour on Saturday night or both, you took advantage of the one-time positive quality of daylight savings ending — an hour gained.
For us Wisconsin folk, daylight savings time in 2019 began at 2 a.m. on Sunday, March 10 and ended on Sunday, November 3 at 2 a.m.
If you missed out on taking advantage of this hour gained on Sunday morning, you might as well hibernate until March, and dream of warmer, longer days.
Just kidding. Just because the sun is rising at 6:30 a.m. and setting around 5 p.m., doesn’t mean you need to be pissed until March. Make the most of the winter days while we have it.
It starts with slight alterations to the sleep schedule. This can be extremely difficult, so that’s why taking this process slow is suggested. If you want to keep falling asleep at 2 a.m. and waking up at noon, you are only giving yourself a little under five hours to enjoy daylight.
Start setting the alarm a little earlier and make the alarm persistent. Make a mental plan the night before to be productive earlier in the day. Make a plan to work out earlier in the morning to start your day, make breakfast or get up earlier to go get coffee and start homework.
If you are like me and can’t fall asleep quickly, making this mental plan and committing to it may mean sacrificing some sleep at first. Eventually though, if you train yourself to wake up around 7 a.m. to start your day, your body will give in a little earlier in the night and you will start falling asleep at a decent hour. This will allow seven or eight hours of rest.
It’s easy to give up and let the cold, shortened days determine your mood and lack of production. If you need to get up earlier and take some time to yourself to do the things that make you feel happy and productive, then it might be worth making some painful changes to the sleep schedule in the long run.
School seems like an even bigger challenge when it gets colder and darker, so this is the perfect time to practice some self-discipline and fight back against the external pressures of time and weather.
Don’t let externalities control how you go about your day and make you sleepwalk through the rest of the semester. Take back control of your mood and relieve your stress. Make a conscious, internal effort to keep your spirits up by starting your day a little earlier.
