Best intentions…

This morning, I rose at 7am, a full two hours before the work bell rang.

If you are worried that I was the victim of a burglary, or that my sheets were the victim of my faltering bladder, fear not.

The truth is that this early-awakening craic is a new sleep-strategy that I’ve been employing for the last lock of months, at least a couple of days a week, anyway.

Allow me to elaborate.

On mornings that I choose to waive my god-given right to doze like an overworked donkey, the phone alarm shakes me at 6.45am, gets two five-minute snoozes, whereupon the sounding of the second I drag my semi-conscious carcass out of the sack, stumble to the bathroom, and accelerate my arrival into the waking world with a few splashes of cold water, right between eyes.

Now, before you start sleep-shaming yourself, I am not writing this column to make you feel bad about your liking for a lie-in. Let it be known that I, too, love nothing more than rolling around the scratcher until all the worms are eaten, and the early birds are bursting at the seams.

However, a while ago I read something about ‘over-sleeping’ – the act of slumbering so deep and long that you, somehow, wake up more tired than before you went to bed.

These super-snoozes, so the article professed, wreak havoc with something called your ‘circadian rhythm’, with the effect of rendering you a lump of lethargy and laziness.

Anyway, in the spirit of empirical experimentation, I have been getting up earlier for the last couple of months, and my findings have been startling.

For one, I have discovered that I am indeed brighter if I sleep six hours instead of eight.

In addition, though, I have also been surprised to learn just how capable I am of self-compromise, or, to put it another way, bluffing myself.

When I first became aware of the unexpected degree of alertness I gained from getting up a few hours earlier, I decided that I would use my hitherto untapped energy to power a lock of early morning runs, Rocky style.

For a few weeks, this was going great.

There I was, galloping down the street with a spring in my step, while some of the birds were still singing lullabies of the night before.

“Paris 2024, here I come,” I said to myself, childhood dreams of Olympic glory racing to reassemble themselves from broken pieces on the floor of my subconscious.

However, after about a fortnight, I decided that there was no need to be jumping out of bed, getting my gear on straight away, and running out the door like a lunatic.

“What’s with the rush lad?

“Relax, take your time. Most people are still snoring,” I said, forgetting that half the world’s population – including my-very-own-self during my previous jobs – start work at seven o’clock or before.

Instead of coming out of the traps at top speed, I decided to henceforth give myself 15 minutes to have a light bit of breakfast and a cup of coffee, reasoning that doing so would actually enable me to get more out of my run.

“Like those Lucozade Sport ads – or is it Durex? I can never mind – I’ll be able to go faster for longer,” I thought.

Indeed, after a few mornings of trying out my adjusted routine, I was sure I was reaping some slight performance-boosting rewards.

“Deadly,” I said to myself, starting to get the sense that this new routine had quickly entrenched itself down in the teeth-brushing depths of my habitual behaviour.

This is where things started to slip, consistency being the first casualty of overconfidence.

Before I knew it, I had relocated from the kitchen table to living room sofa, and, before long, no more was I monastically obeying 15 minutes of unstimulated, meditative toast-eating, but rather spending 20 minutes under a blanket, reading my book.

“Jesus, that’s a wile morning,” I started to say to myself, my eyes searching half-puddles for the smallest suggestion of precipitation.

“Sure, I am reading my book anyway, which is basically exercise for the brain,” I’d postulate, licking my finger and flicking the page.

I don’t know about you, but there is nothing like avoiding something you really think you should be doing, to make you do something you usually couldn’t be bothered doing.

Maybe the trick is to find an even more miserable task than the one you are currently avoiding, thus harnessing the power of your capacity to procrastinate.

Which reminds me, my new self-help book, ‘Meta-procrastination: How to not bother your way to the top’, is available at all reputable retailers from Monday, April 29.