I have always had an internal alarm clock, and I think the snooze button is broken.

I’m not sure when it started. Likely, it was not when I was young – and I’m fairly certain that my parents would concur. But sometime in the last 20 years or so, the alarm has gotten set, never requiring a backup battery, so to speak.

The alarm clock is pretty regular – around 5 AM every day, seven days a week. On most alarm clocks, there is a snooze button that allows an extra 10 minutes or so of extra sleep. I know of co-workers who hit the real snooze button several times each day, then rush to get ready to leave. My alarm is different. It has no snooze button, no need for one.

When my internal alarm goes off, my brain knows that there is no snooze button. My mind starts racing at what needs done, and the race continues until I’m up – about 10 minutes later at the most. I have done my best to convince myself to sleep in – to wait until the real alarm goes off (set “just in case”), but that is never the case. Once my body’s alarm goes off, I’m up for the day.

While this internal alarm clock is all well and good, I cannot reset based on when I go to bed. If I go to bed at midnight, I’m up at 5. If I go to bed at 11, I’m up at 5. If I am exhausted from a long day and happen to drop at 9 (maybe twice in a year), I’m up before 5, but never after. I think that the most sleep I have gotten in the past year was 7 hours once or twice, most of the time it’s around 5 – 5 1/2 hours. Once I hit that mark, the internal alarm goes off. And, as I said before, there is no need for a snooze button.

So, it’s 5:15 AM and I’m awake. Maybe I’ll go back to sleep – yeah, right…