Every weekday morning I wake up before my alarm goes off. Sometimes 5 minutes before, sometimes an hour, sometimes in between. Regardless of the time my brain immediately says “turn off your alarm and sleep a little longer.”
See, my alarm is set for about 30 minutes before I actually need to get up because every weekday morning I go for a 1 mile run. And every weekday morning, my brain tries to talk me out of it. “You’re so tired” it says. “You haven’t even gotten 8 hours” it says. “Wouldn’t you like that extra 30 minutes to just sleep?”
The thing is I rarely ever sleep that extra 30 minutes. The second I turn that first alarm off, my brain whirs up into high gear and instead I spend that 30 minutes trying to talk myself and my body into just getting up already.
So why are you like this, brain? Just go for the stupid run. There hasn’t been a single day where I was like, yeah, I shouldn’t have gone for that run, I regret it. I never regret it. But I always regret the mornings my brain wins and I don’t go. If anything I feel more tired on those days that my brain wins and I don’t go. What’s that about?
Anyway, this goes back to just doing the hard thing. It’s never going to get easier to drag your ass out of bed, to do the thing… anything, really. So just tell your brain to shut up, and do it.
And don’t forget to stretch.
Note: I wrote this on Sunday, but took the pictures on Monday for anyone keeping track of the date on my watch 🙂