For this project, I chose to change my behavior of waking up early. For the last week, I have been averaging less than seven hours of sleep with very poor sleep quality, waking up multiple times in the night. Thus, I wanted to motivate myself to wake up early so that I would be able to maintain a similar sleep pattern everyday. My goal was to wake up at 8 am everyday so that I would have time to work out in the morning. Over the last 7 days, I succeeded in my goal everyday except for the Monday that we had a three-day weekend for MLK Day. Since I have two roommates, I found that they were able to keep me accountable because one or the other would always be waking up around 8 am for their classes. Their morning routines started to rub off on me. Additionally, even if they weren’t waking up early, I would still wake up at 8 am because I was motivated to turn off my alarm so that it would not snooze and wake them up. Thus, this exercise showed me that having partners in behavior change will help you stay on track to hit your goals. Additionally, the idea of having a consequence can help reinforce behavior. Disturbing my roommates was a consequence that I wanted to avoid, so I would wake up more on time.
As seen in my fishbone model, a cause of not waking up early was my poor sleep quality. I noticed that in order to wake up early, I was trying other mechanisms to improve my sleep quality and forming better nightly routines such as setting out my clothes for the night before or forming goals for the next day.
As seen in my Connection Circle, internal factors such as being hungry or thirsty in the morning helped me get up in the morning because I would have an intrinsic motivation for waking up. What I found was having a very interesting dream would decrease the likelihood that I would want to wake up early because I would want to stay in my dream state.
If I were to do anything differently, I would change my goal so that I would have to sleep early AND wake up early. Although I was waking up early, I wasn’t necessarily sleeping early, so I would still wake up super tired and exhausted in the morning. I was hitting the behavior change that I wanted, but it didn’t necessarily improve my mood or feelings about my day in the morning because achieving my goal didn’t solve for other issues in my life. Another change I would introduce is giving myself more flexibility for my goal so that I could allow myself “cheat days” for waking up later such that the goal could feel more sustainable in the long-term.
