Sleep Theories

So in the past couple months I've had A LOT of nights/mornings where my body seems to want to wake up an hour earlier than normal. At first, it was extremely frustrating. I finally got my last baby to sleep through the night and now my body was like "sleep? Eh...we'll sleep when we're dead!" haha (but not really haha!). However, I noticed if I actually got up at that point and did something, I felt more productive and energetic throughout the day. If I forced myself to stay in bed I'd either fall back asleep RIGHT before my alarm went off, which made me more tired, or I'd feel like I started my day on a lazier note and wouldn't be as motivated to get stuff done. I started to wonder if maybe I didn't NEED 7-8 hours of sleep and could function off of less sleep.

Backstory: there's an episode of American Dad where Stan gets a pill that helps him not need sleep at night. He ends up spending the day with his family and then using the nights for things he wants. Francine ends up taking the pill with him, but they do their own things at night and watching them do so much I was jealous. I told Larry over and over that I wish that pill actually existed because it would be SO nice to have more time to do what I wanted and not need sleep, but just have it as an extra thing if I didn't have anything else to do. 

Now, let me just say, I didn't want to FORCE less sleep on my body. However, if it naturally woke up earlier, why not just get up and get things done? Now that I work in the office (so kids interrupt a lot of stuff) and my new promotion I got a couple months ago keeping me MUCH busier at work I have a lot less "me" time during the day than I used to have. So I figure, why not use an extra hour in the morning to get those "me time" things done? On the plus side, I also thought I could use some mornings to start learning computer programming again (I was doing some coding/SQL work before I had Pierce and was trying to figure out times to fit that back into my schedule). The more I thought about it, the more this started to make sense. 

I decided to first figure out if I was the only person who felt this way. I put some polls on my Instagram stories and found out quite a few people that I know are the same way. Most prefer more sleep, obviously, but there were some people out there like me that felt more productive and like they didn't need as much sleep. I figured why not test it out a few mornings? So, for the past few weeks, I have been waking up an hour earlier once a week to get some things done and you know what? I LOVE it! That extra hour that's so silent in the mornings, I can eat my breakfast in peace, do what work I needed to do for me with no interruptions (except maybe when nature calls haha), and I felt so much more productive during the day!

So I have officially decided now that Pierce has gotten his first tooth, once we navigate this time change coming up and after this week we're taking off, I'm going to start waking up an hour earlier Monday through Thursday. This gives me Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to get any extra rest my body might need (especially while I'm adjusting at first) and I get 4 days to get extra stuff done. I have a few things I feel I'll need to focus on for the holidays, but after New Years I'm going to do my coding/programming 3 of the 4 mornings, and let the 4th one be a "free for all" morning to do any other things I want. I'm very excited about this plan and hope it works out that I can function without feeling too exhausted AND get so much done! Wish me luck that I don't end up hating this and going back to "sleeping in", if you can call it that with 4 kids.