One of the things that I insisted that my children do until they were out on their own if they were living in my house and my responsibility was to get up by 9am. They argued with me and they would ignore me and sleep in and then complain about not having time to do things.
And I told them I didn’t teach you to sleep past 9am, I taught you to get up by 9am because if you sleep past 9am you’re burning daylight and you’re not going to accomplish things. I had friends at work that would sleep half the day away and then take a nap in the afternoon and then complain about how they couldn’t sleep at night.
And I just kind of laughed and said well if you get up and you move around you’re going to be tired at night but if you sleep all day you ain’t going to be tired. Even working shift work I made myself get up.
If I worked a closer and was at work until after midnight I would still get up no later than 9am because number one I didn’t want to waste the day and number two if I was really tired I’d take a nap in the afternoon to help recover from the late shift. I learned this watching my father as he got older and my mother too, but when we would go and visit down there at their house they would talk about how they wanted to fix breakfast for us the next morning and then dad wouldn’t get up until after 10 a.m. I would have been up since about 6 30 at the latest and would be hungry so I’m fixing my own breakfast then he would come stumbling out of the bedroom and say oh hey let me let me get busy fixing bacon and eggs and an hour later we’re eating quote unquote breakfast. But it’s practically lunchtime because he didn’t get up.
Not a big deal. And if you’re not working it’s really not an issue, but I’ve seen so many articles about older people getting their days and nights turned around. So many younger people, and even older people too, get into trouble because at night, at two and three in the morning, they think nobody’s watching and it’s not a big deal so they do whatever they want or they do things they’re not supposed to be doing, and then they get in trouble.
I just think it’s better if you get up no later than 9 a .m. no matter what’s going on. It’s one of those discipline things that I think help make somebody unstoppable because when people realize you’re actually gonna be up and you’re actually gonna be paying attention, they know that they can count on you and they don’t have to make backup plans every time they ask you to help them to do something or to meet them somewhere or anything like that.
So get up, sleepy head, teach yourself to actually listen and do what the alarm that you set said to do. Don’t set it for any later than 9 a.m. That way you can become unstoppable too.