When I was younger, I would beg my parents to let me stay up "just a liiiiittle longer." When my mom and dad gave in, staying up until 8:30 p.m. instead of just 8 p.m. made me feel a lil badass. Now that I'm in college, I can guarantee you that nobody appreciates the beauty of sleep more than a red-eyed, foggy-minded college student who relies on Dunkin Donuts coffee to make them feel like a real person in the morning. Once we're awake, everything's fine — the problem is the actual act of waking up. It's no fun.
Here are the stages of waking up, as told by the Internet's cutest polar bears.
1. Refusal
The alarm on your phone goes off, and you silently (or audibly) groan, preparing to shield yourself from the dangers that lurk outside the cozy sanctuary that is your bed.
2. Despair
Maybe you curl into a ball and roll over, or you just lie there, refusing to move. Either way, there's only one thought running through your mind: "Why is this happening to me?"
3. Denial
This is different from refusal. This is the part where you write off the sound of your alarm as irrelevant. You proceed to tuck your covers over yourself and prepare to re-enter hibernation.
4. Annoyance
When you realize that this IS happening to you, that you HAVE to wake up, you groan again. "Is this for real?"
5. Bargaining
Once you've gotten over how heinous it is that you actually have to wake up, you make deals with yourself. "I'll still make it to Calc if I wake up 10 minutes." So you curl up again and close your eyes.
6. Realization
Those 10 minutes seem to fly by, don't they? You slowly open your eyes and realize that no amount of bargaining or denial is going to change the fact that you have to get up eventually.
7. Acceptance
You finally decide it's time to leave your warm, cozy nest of a bed to face the real world, and you think to yourself, "Ugh."
