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Friday, March 29, 2024

Wake up and get that bread, you’ll thank yourself later

Good morning, Gators! If that greeting is even remotely accurate to you, give yourself a pat on the back and keep up that persistence. For the rest of you who, like myself, struggle with getting out of bed and maintaining a routine, I’m here to offer you some words of advice. Become someone who can be productive before a 9:35 a.m. class. You’ll become a part of a class so elite that even AirPod users won’t be able to compare to your power.

Let me paint a picture of the sort of morning we all strive for. You wake up without hitting snooze, open the blinds of your bedside window letting in sunny rays, filling your room with a calming and stimulating natural light. You drink a glass of cold water and get dressed, take a couple of minutes to meditate because you’re a college student and you’re into that sort of new-agey thing. Fifteen minutes after you’ve woken up, you’re on the RTS taking you directly to Southwest Recreation Center, where you wave to the regulars (of whom you are one) and rouse your senses with an intense, but gratifying workout. A little over an hour later, you get back to your dorm or apartment and straight into perfecting your culinary skills, practicing the easy-to-learn but hard-to-master art of scrambled eggs, crispy bacon and perfectly brewed coffee. After breakfast, before you leave, you shower and get dressed, checking yourself out in the mirror with a new self-confidence inspired by the amount you’ve accomplished in a little over two hours before your first class.

This, my friends, is what we all stand to gain if we embrace a little discipline; however, this picturesque morning is often sabotaged by the vices of the traditional Gainesville experience. The main obstacle in the way of good morning habits are bad sleeping habits. Getting to sleep late is an almost sure-fire way to have difficulty waking up early, which is why the kids who go to Midtown on a Monday night usually miss their Tuesday morning classes or show up looking like Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. Fear not, though, because you aren’t alone in your nightly habits. Partying ruins sleep schedules, but so does social media, poor planning and plain old hanging out.

Scrolling through Snapchat stories (which nobody really does anymore) for an hour before bed not only waste time you could have spent sleeping, but it also tricks your brain into thinking it’s closer to daytime than it really is. Cramming that chemistry worksheet at midnight might seem like a good idea in class that morning, but after eight more hours of taxing UF life, your work is going to be of a diminished quality and you’ll feel as though you need a full day of sleep to recover from studying into the night.

As it stands for most of us, all of the upsides of a rewarding morning routine are within our grasp. Life is stressful, but there are ways to relieve some of this stress. However difficult the college experience can be and however many difficult decisions we encounter each day, it is entirely possible to navigate young adulthood in a responsible and fulfilling way.

The path is different for each of us, depending on how much sleep we need or how much we value our productivity against our social lives. How we start our mornings has the power to control how the rest of the day will be. Our job is to make that routine and follow it the best we can. Creating and sticking to a morning routine is all we really need to set ourselves up for consistent mornings full of bench presses and bacon.

Kyle Cunningham is a UF English freshman. His column appears on Mondays.

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