Stop Hitting Snooze

Navigating the Space Between Comfort and Change.

I’m awake. A phone alarm pierces the sound of cars passing along the Durham Highway. The previous night, I put my phone across the room to prevent myself from hitting the snooze button multiple times. I knew I didn’t want to sleep past 8am and start my work day late or miss the gym.

I stand and shuffle my feet to the corner of the room. I slap my hand on the alarm until it shuts up. Almost without thinking, my bed welcomes me back, and I ignore the day’s mission.

I wake up 15 minutes later, another alarm rattling. Perhaps I am just as tired as before, so I go back to bed.

This repeats a few times. Once I decide to no longer dismiss the impending day, it is well past 8am. A sense of guilt and anguish overcome me. By staying in too late, I lose the momentum of the morning. I rob myself of the simple satisfaction of doing what I know I am supposed to. Yet it’s also too hard to find fire in me to move onward.

Eventually, I mop myself up and out the door quickly, rushing every aspect of what I used to consider precious time. Something bigger wasn’t properly aligned. 

This was a random Tuesday in January. Or it might have been a Wednesday. It might have been in February or even March. I’m not sure. It happened too often to tell.

This was how I started my 2024.

Tired.

---

I’m awake, one year earlier. I am eased out of sleep by a subtle shaking. The new bed alarm I bought a few days ago. As I roll across my bed and turn my alarm off, I'm overcome with excitement. It reads 05:55. I take a deep breath and sit up. Gratitude washes over me. I’m ready for my quest. I rise from bed and walk out of my bedroom, not needing a second alarm to coerce me. 

Surfline reads 4-6ft+. I can feel adrenaline start to pump. I open my patio door and grab my wetsuit, feeling the cold California morning air stimulate my senses. The sun peeks out of the horizon, shining on my hung up wetsuit. I tip-toe out of the apartment, board and wetsuit in hand. It was time to conquer the Pacific. Or be conquered, depending on the conditions.

This was a distinct Thursday one year prior in January of 2023. I was in my final year of college. Much of that winter is distinct and memorable in my mind.

Two very different Bens, separated by only a year. What changed?

I decided to pick up my life and move to North Carolina that January of 2024. Winters were colder, there was no ocean in sight, and many of my other secondary hobbies were also displaced from my daily routine.

An iconic building in the city, I believe.

I wanted to learn how to properly settle in a new place where I would have to create a new me without these hobbies. My then partner had also just moved there. Five solid years of my life were spent in Southern California prior. It’s where I became the man I am today. And I always wondered whether I could be happy outside of SoCal. North Carolina was my chance of getting past this mental blockade.

But the move was harder on me physically, mentally and socially than I had calculated. I believe I did a poor job of depicting the situation positively in my mind (more on that in a separate post). At its core, the problem wasn’t that I developed a habit of sleeping in.

I wasn’t just snoozing an alarm clock, I was snoozing my soul. I had moved, but I hadn’t settled. Life didn’t excite me as much as it used to because I hadn’t taken deliberate steps to re-introduce excitement. I was paralyzed by novelty and naivety over how to handle it properly. 

It wasn’t my body but my soul that was having a hard time waking up.

---

I believe the universe offers us a lot of grace and forgiveness when we need to learn certain lessons. I was able to hit snooze on my soul for months. Without actively reflecting, it was easy to let this time slide.

I also know I shouldn’t try and fool myself into thinking I can only live where there is surf; my problem wasn’t my change of morning routine, but rather that I hadn’t given proper effort to fill the void with something else that excites me enough to jump out of bed. One of the trickiest parts of early adult life is going from a world where everything is mapped out on a syllabus, to having no set path nor an easy way to measure your progress. I believe being thrown into this lack of structure and learning to handle it is adulthood’s right-of-passage. 

This gap between the end of college and working life accentuates any weaknesses you might have.

We all have our own unique ways of snoozing. We drive past the gym on our way home instead of stopping to mend our physical health. We ignore the phone call from our parents when they love us and just want to check in. We keep not reading that book that we’ve been recommended by our therapist, or not going to therapy to begin with. 

The ocean can be just as unforgiving as life sometimes.

When we ignore these things, we sink further and further under life’s comforter and center ourselves in the bed we should be working to get out of. It’s only after we force ourselves—or are forced—awake and realize something. We've missed what we needed to change. We should have risen earlier and valued our time and energy. 

Your soul will revolt when you're not pursuing what you're meant to do.

---

Take a moment to inventory the areas in your life where you may be hitting snooze. What have you been ignoring or putting off? What changes are the universe signaling are overdue, or something you should not settle with? Write them down, acknowledge them, and make a plan to start addressing them. Now. No matter how uncomfortable. Your purpose depends on it. 

Do not feel regret once you find these things. Feel gratitude. The ability to frame our external world is one of the last lines of freedom that we possess as human beings. The very act of finding things should be framed as a larger victory than the defeat we feel knowing the flaw existed to begin with. 

---

There is great benefit to taking time to properly reflect and question. I have realized that, to be a man of action, I must first ask what is happening, then seek action. I was not doing this. I created the Awoken Question to thoroughly ponder on the well-timed questions, and perhaps for some, inspire well-timed actions.

I am finally awake.