One easy thing to do to improve your life is to pretend the snooze feature on your alarm does not exist. Disregard it.

Waking up is easy for me. With so much to do and so little time, the last thing I want to do when I wake up is go back to sleep. I’m so excited to start my day that at least once a week I wake up in the middle of the night and check the time to see if it’d be inappropriate to get up for the day. 3:30 a.m.? I might just get up and start my day. 11:45 p.m.? Too early. I’ll try to shut off my brain and lay there until I fall back asleep. The other six nights of the week, I fall asleep within two minutes of putting my head on the pillow and wake up early without a spending a second more awake.

But it wasn’t always that way. As a younger guy, I’d hit snooze a few times to “ease myself awake.” It was a BS excuse, and I knew it. Getting up for the day back then was a challenge and required a hit of willpower.

During Marine Corps Infantry Officer’s Course, I learned two principles I try to use to guide my sleep: first, when suffering through sleep deprivation, any little bit of sleep helps. Second, long stretches of uninterrupted sleep are best because they facilitate rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. When your alarm goes off and you slam the snooze three times, you technically get 27 more minutes of sleep, but that 27 minutes is made up of three, nine-minute intervals. This is much less quality sleep than if you had allowed yourself the 27 minutes to begin with–not to mention you may have cut off your sleep during a REM cycle, and you don’t magically fall back into the same deep sleep. For me this would change my average 6:15 night of sleep to 5:48 of real sleep, followed by 27 minutes of interrupted, low quality sleep.

As high energy guy with work to do, I need every bit of high quality sleep my brain allows before it gets too revved-up and ready to go and sleep becomes impossible. I average probably 6:15 of sleep per night right now because there are so many things I want to do. By not sleeping the 8-plus hours recommended, I have two extra hours in my day compared to most people. I use those hours to lift weights, work on my career, and to move this web site along. This is not healthy and will likely catch up to me someday, but I’m a semi-young guy and need to get things accomplished.

Someone very close to me in my family (wink, wink little sister) used to be dramatically sleep-deprived and reliant on coffee for her existence. At times, she let her snooze go off for an hour (sometimes 90 minutes) before rising. While this does not literally affect her total time asleep per night by more than a minute or two (the time it takes to hit the snooze button and fall back asleep six times per morning), it destroys her quality of sleep. So her–let’s say–5:30 minutes of uninterrupted sleep becomes 4:30 or a horrific 4:00 if she hits snooze nine times. She’s cheated herself out of at least one full REM sleep cycle. I think she does better now, but she cheated herself out of years of comfort by hitting the snooze so much.

After a short while of skipping the snooze, getting up becomes second-nature and is easy to do. And, counter-intuitively to most, you’ll feel better rested. If you stick with it, you’ll get more quality sleep while spending the same about of time in bed. So, a few weeks of disciple to solidify the habit could net some people significant gains in terms of hours-of-quality-sleep per night.

Skipping the snooze is simple, and it may change your life

*Now, for me there is one instance where I hit the snooze button. About once a month, I wake up after just a couple hours of sleep. I’ll be asleep by 10 and sleep hard until 12:30 or 1:00. In this case, I will fight the temptation to get up and start my day, which I have done in extra stressful times–this never really ends well. Often this takes an hour or two until I fall back asleep because I go over goals, concerns, and stress in my head, but I am exhausted by the time my 4:40 alarm goes off. When this happens, I normally wake up at 4:40 and reset the alarm for 6:00. Since I dictate my own schedule at work as far as when I arrive, whether I’m starting my work day at 6:50 like normal or 8:30, no one knows the difference. And in my line of work, most people don’t even show up for work until 9:00. Since this happens only once per month, I cannot claim that I never hit the snooze button. Maybe I should’ve titled this post “How to wake up without hitting snooze 96.7% of the time,” but–let’s be honest–you wouldn’t have clicked on it.