Tips For Getting Up After Weighted Blanket Slumber

A night of sleep with a weighted blanket is like no other. When the morning light comes around, you’re comfy and you’re cozy. You’re snuggled underneath at least 15 pounds of soft hand-knit fabric and you’re not quite ready to forgo your horizontal bliss and face the world yet. However, if today isn’t a slow Sunday morning and you’ve got to get your butt into gear, here are some ways to get yourself up and start your day. And if you’re counting down the minutes until you can curl up underneath your blanket again, we don’t blame you. We’re obviously all about that.

Skip The Snooze Button

If you’re a part of the majority of people who hit the snooze regularly, you know that little button can be a love-hate relationship. On the one hand, sneaking in another 9 minutes of sleep sounds appealing. On the other hand, those extra minutes don’t count for much and actually may make you even more sleepy. If you fall back asleep between snoozes, you’ll experience ‘sleep inertia’, which is when you drift off but don’t enter a deep sleep cycle. This will leave you much groggier than if you had popped up with the first noise of your alarm. Surveys have shown that up to two-thirds of women and a little over one-half of men snooze their alarms once. If you’re not able to just snap your fingers and stop snoozing, keep reading to uncover more helpful tips for waking up easier.

Photo by Yasin Hasan on Unsplash

Place Your Alarm Across The Room

Try a trick that’s been around as long as alarm clocks. Placing your alarm across the room means you have to physically get up and turn it off. While this was more common during the pre-smartphone-alarm days, it can still apply in our technologically-advanced era. After all, keeping your phone in bed with you is not conducive to sleeping, anyway! Set your alarm nice and loud and stash it across the room. Once it blares, you’ll begin the waking up process by going to turn it off. Now you just have to fight the urge to hop back into bed…

An alternative to putting your phone across the room is using this modern equivalent: there are some smartphone apps that can ensure you’re up in no time by requiring you to solve complex problems or math equations before it shuts off the alarm. Let’s hope you can figure them out eventually or you might be running late for an entirely different reason!

Hop In The Shower

Although the coziness of your bed is hard to resist, if you immediately hop to the bathroom and take a shower, you’ll be much less likely to get back into bed afterward. If you’re feeling extra tired and a sudden urge to be hardcore, you can take a cold shower to wake you up even faster. While not exactly pleasant (especially in the winter), we can guarantee you won’t be tired anymore. A shower of alternating hot and cold temperatures is actually good for your health, too. It boosts your immune system, increases circulation, and can even help you burn fat. Brave the cold and reap the benefits! Don’t forget to end the shower on a hot temperature, though. Otherwise, you’ll be headed straight back to the warmth of your bed afterward.

Photo by Carson Masterson on Unsplash

Get In Tune With Your Sleep Cycles

Our sleep cycles tend to be about 90 minutes long, meaning that you cycle through all of the stages of sleep during that time. If you wake up in the middle of the deepest sleep stage, you’ll likely be feeling groggy and sluggish. You can try to time your sleep cycles the old-fashioned way, by going to sleep either 7.5 or 9 hours before you need to wake up.

Another option involves the handy smartphone again. Apps like Sleep Cycle can help to wake you up at the lightest stage of your sleep cycle, so you wake up feeling refreshed. As sometimes our sleep cycles can vary slightly from the 90-minute mark, the apps work well by listening to your breathing pattern and waking you up gently at the best possible time.

Plan Something Fun

You may or may not think that going to work is a fun activity, but there are plenty of other small things you can plan for the morning that can help bolster your enthusiasm for getting out of bed. You can plan to do a meditation, go for a little walk, cook up a yummy breakfast, or schedule some time with a friend or loved one for a quick trip to the cafe before heading to work. Whatever it is that gets you going and makes you happy, plan to do it first thing in the morning. Before you know it, you’ll be springing out of bed to head out to your favorite activity.

Photo by Ivan Timov on Unsplash

Awaken Your Senses

Our senses are pretty powerful. Just imagine the scent of freshly brewed coffee or sizzling bacon wafting into your bedroom. You can program your coffee maker to start brewing around wake-up time to entice you out of bed. (Pretty sure there’s not one of those for bacon, though.)

Other senses that you can stimulate include sight and sound. Open up your curtains and let the light stream through your windows. Sunshine, especially first thing in the morning, wakes you up by flooding your body with blue light (yep, the same kind we try to avoid at nighttime). This tells your hormones that it’s time to get moving on the day!

Using music or sounds to wake you up is another option. This will vary person to person—you may just want gentle nature noises, or you may be one who prefers headbanging heavy metal to get you going. Whichever you choose, utilizing smell, sight, and sound can be a great way to get your body moving. But don’t worry, you’ll be back under your weighted blanket before you know it.