Recently, I've been noticing not just a trend about health and wellness articles surfacing online, but ones specifically about better sleeping habits and morning and night routines. Recently, I started a new job with the longest commute I've had to endure so far. While this is a very trivial negative for an otherwise fantastic opportunity, the elongated commute has been adding to my schedule – particularly when it comes to what time I would need to go to bed and wake up in the morning.

Truth be told, my sleep cycle is a bit of a mess right now. I'll either crash as early as 9:30 p.m. some nights – something I haven't done since my 7th grade bedtime. Otherwise, I'll stay up too late – to the early morning hours between 2-5 a.m. Obviously having such drastic shifts between day to day increments is essentially putting my body through jetlag, so I've been trying to adapt better routines into my schedule.

I've read plenty of times that the tone of your alarm clock can essentially set your mindset for the day. Using a smart home device, I don't think I have the option to change up the default alarm tone, but thankfully it is peaceful enough to not jar me awake. However, I find alarms overall to be super detrimental to sleeping cycles in general. I find that knowing I have one set doesn't let me fully enter deep sleep – particularly if I'm hitting snooze in intervals, which is a bad habit I'm trying to break. Not only that, but I constantly find myself jolting awake in the middle of the night almost screaming (or at least it feels that way when I'm disoriented) "Okay Google what alarms do I have set?!" Since I have a paranoid, but not illogical, fear of sleeping in and missing work.

Overall, I think I need to become better about winding down at a consistent hour and entering sleep in a more peaceful mindset that can hopefully keep me asleep all night. I think that implementing a nighttime routine can not only help with this but also doing things like setting alarms on multiple devices can help soothe my mind for the must-needed rest.