No Alarm

I mentioned on Monday that I slept napped for roughly 30 minutes on Sunday night. I lasted all day without falling asleep! (Although my team's 1 o'clock meeting tested my willpower.) I think I survived Monday because I took an Excedrin at 7 a.m. to deal with the headache that I woke up with at 3:45 a.m. For those who don't know, Excedrin Extra Strength contains 65 mg of caffeine... caffeine that has been absent from my body for the past month. My theory is that those measly 65 mg was enough to power my decaffeinated body through the entire work day as well as through a Dave and Busters happy hour, dinner, bowling, and video-gaming. Around 8 p.m., I started to feel a bit lethargic, so I left. I admit that I didn't do P90X on Monday... Stop those judging stares right now! I doubled up on Wednesday and Thursday to make up for the workouts I missed!

By the time I finally got home, I was on auto-pilot. I dumped my dirty Tupperware from lunch into the sink to deal with later and went about my nightly get-ready-for-bed routine. I crawled into bed and realized that it was now the time to decide when to wake up. Knowing how badly my body needed sleep, I said "Screw it. I'll wake up when I wake up." So for the first week night since starting Paleo, I actually followed the sleeping advice of waking up when your body is rested. I fell asleep around 9:15 p.m. after reading 2 of the introductory pages of The Paleo Diet Cookbook, and woke up a glorious 9 hours and 30 minutes later at 6:45 a.m.

When I told Z that I hadn't set an alarm, his response was "Did you not care when you'd wake up?" Well, I'm a very responsible person who plans a lot, so of course I cared about when I would wake up, whether I would have time to fit in P90X before work, and when I would make it in to work. But for once, I chose sleep over everything else. I chose my health over work and working out. Plus, I wake up at 5 a.m. most days, so it was highly unlikely that I'd sleep in until 10 and leave my bosses wondering what happened to me all morning. And I'm sure one of my co-workers would have called me to make sure I was alive. At least I hope they would care.

Waking up without an alarm is pretty awesome though. You don't get jolted awake like those falling dreams we all have (I always wake up before I hit the ground. I don't know if that's good or not). Plus, you're more likely to get the amount of sleep that your bodies needs as opposed to the length of time that you're allowing yourself to have. I urge you to try it at least once. Suggestions for the first time that you try this:

1. Determine when you want to wake up. I ideally like to wake up by 5 a.m. to fit in a workout, cook breakfast, and get to work by 7
2. Set a backup alarm, but plan to wake up long before then. I want to wake up by 5. Because I have to get to work by 8 (core hours), I can sleep until 7 a.m. at the latest. My backup alarm time is therefore 7 a.m. Notice I have 2 hours of time in between my wake up time and my backup alarm.
3. Set a sleep alarm. This is the time that you need to go to bed to get X hours of sleep (fill in the blank here - do 8 or more). I aim for 8 hours of sleep every night, which means that I have to go to bed my 9 p.m. I like to have a warning alarm, so I'll set my alarm for 8:30. This let's me have a 30-minute window to wrap everything up and get ready for bed. 
4. Bright and early. If you must use an alarm consider one that slowly brightens the room. Or, use the actual sunrise (that is, if you wake up at a reasonable hour at which the sun is actually rising unlike the 5 a.m. I do when it's still dark outside).

Ideally I'd like to do this every day, but in order to do so, I need to find more hours in the day. Any suggestions for slowly down time?