Bad habit of waking up late due to multiple factors. How do I break it?

[Eryn]

Hey all :)

 

So, for years, I've had trouble waking up early on my own. These days, I wake up at 11am or 12pm on average --- way too late, I know. This is despite me setting multiple alarms on my phone and putting the phone in a place that's hard to reach.

 

I believe this bad habit has formed for multiple reasons:

• difficulty falling asleep without something (ex: an audiobook or calming music) playing in the background to distract me from my own thoughts --- I have both ADHD and anxiety, and trouble falling asleep has been strongly correlated with both conditions.
• mental laziness in the form of me turning the alarm off, thinking to myself, "Just 5 more minutes..." and the next thing you know, hours have passed before I decide to get out of bed.
• vivid dreams from Zoloft (sertraline) --- I started taking this medication about a year ago to treat my anxiety. It works pretty well, but the main drawback is that it sometimes causes me to have dreams that are barely distinguishable from reality, to the point where it takes me hours to wake up and realize that I had in fact been asleep the whole time.
• side effects from Keppra (an anti-epileptic drug) --- I have been taking it for almost a decade to treat my seizures, but drowsiness is one of the most commonly experienced side effects.
• lack of structure in my life due to me no longer having to physically travel to school/work.

 

When I wake up early, it's almost always because I'm forced to, whether it's school, work, or some other event I have to attend. But since that need for punctuality has largely been removed, I've found myself slipping back into my bad habit of going to bed late and waking up late. 

 

I think another reason for this is that, ever since I've moved back in with my family due to the COVID-19 crisis, my general level of discipline has gone down. I no longer need to cook, clean, and buy groceries on my own; as a result, I feel lazier than before.

 

To combat my tendency to wake up late and turn off my phone alarms, I've tried putting my phone outside my room or in a place inside my room that's hard for me to reach. The thing is, when I put my phone outside my room, I don't always hear the alarm. Meanwhile, the rest of my family does hear it, and they've complained to me multiple times about being woken up by my alarms.

 

Who else is experiencing something similar? How do you resist the temptation to postpone your alarms?

[JulesVerne]

I've always been an early bird and, like you, since the whole covid thing began, I wake up at around 9-10, wich is very late compared to before when I woke up at 6:30-7am, and yes, it's because I really don't have anything to do. Are you having trouble sleeping, like you feel tired when you wake up, or you just want to wake up early to start out your day? This is like a long vacation so I think that as long as you don't neglect other aspects of your life and you sleep your good 6-8 hours, there's no harm in allowing yourself to wake up late. Now, if you truly want to wake-up early,  I guess the best thing you can do is find something to do early in the morning, something you can't put-off for later, like going for a walk when the parks have less people watering your plants before the sun comes out in all its glory (because that's good for your plants!), or enjoing your breakfast/tea/coffee early on when the day is quiet (sounds romantic, but I've done it before).
I have no experience with the medication, sadly not much I can say for that matter. For everything else it's just about setting up a new routine now that you have to stay inside, say you're gonna reply to work e-mails in the morning, or walk your dog, cook breakfast for your family once a week. Make up a new schedule that will incentiveze you to wake up early, you can also do it gradualy, you don't have to wake up with the sun all 7 days of the week, maybe start with mondays only or every other day. Good luck!