I Wrote Down Every Excuse I Made for Not Getting Up, for Thirty Days

Across thirty mornings I logged every excuse I gave myself for not getting up, and the single most common one wasn’t tiredness — it was bargaining. Eleven of the nineteen mornings I failed, the excuse was some version of a deal struck with an imaginary future self who would supposedly be less tired, less busy, or more willing than the one currently under the blanket.

I didn’t set out to run a study. I started typing these down because I was already writing them anyway, just not to myself. I’d joined a small accountability group on an app called DontSnooze a few months earlier, where I post a short clip of myself upright and moving within a few minutes of my alarm, and three friends see whether I did it. When I don’t, I owe an explanation in the group chat, and at some point in June I noticed I was writing a genuinely different explanation almost every day. That felt worth keeping. So I started a running note titled, unimaginatively, “excuses,” and for the next month I logged the reason — real or invented — every single time the 6:10 a.m. alarm did not get me out of bed on the first ring.

What thirty mornings actually looked like

Day 3: “Five more minutes,” typed at 6:11, alarm silenced by 6:12, actual wake-up at 7:40. The five minutes were never five minutes. Not once across the whole month.

Day 6: A real one. My upstairs neighbor’s dog got into something at 3:20 a.m. — I never found out what, but the barking went on for almost twenty minutes, and I was awake enough afterward that I didn’t fall back asleep until close to 5. When the alarm went off at 6:10 I wrote “up at 3 because of the dog, could not recover” in the group chat, and nobody argued with it, because it was true. That’s a different animal entirely from most of what’s on this list — a night wrecked by something outside my control, not a decision I made and then dressed up afterward.

Day 9: “I’ll make it up on the weekend.” I did not make it up on the weekend. I don’t think anyone ever has.

Day 12: No excuse. I heard the alarm, I looked at my phone, I turned it off, and I went back to sleep for ninety more minutes with full awareness of what I was doing. When I posted about it that afternoon I didn’t write a reason because there wasn’t one worth writing. That’s the entry I keep coming back to, because it’s the most honest one in the whole log — no story, no dressing, just a choice I made against my own stated plan.

Day 15: “My back hurts, lying still a bit longer will help.” It didn’t hurt any less at 7:15 than it had at 6:10.

Day 19: A stomach bug, the real kind, the kind where getting vertical was a genuinely bad idea. Another legitimate one — the second of the month, out of nineteen total misses.

Day 22: “I don’t actually need to be up this early today.” This is the one I’m least proud of, and I’ll get to why in a minute.

Day 24: “Just checking my phone for a second,” followed by eleven minutes of scrolling that somehow didn’t register as being awake.

Day 27: My niece was staying over and climbed into bed at 5-something asking for water. By the time I’d settled her back down I was wrung out enough that the 6:10 alarm felt like a formality. Legitimate interruption number three.

Day 30: “Five more minutes” again, word for word what I’d written on day 3, like I’d learned nothing in between, because I hadn’t. It felt like the same argument between the part of you that stays in bed and the part that gets up that I’d apparently been losing since the beginning of the month.

Sorting the excuses into what they actually were

By the end of the month I had nineteen logged failures out of thirty attempts, which is a worse ratio than I expected going in and roughly in line with what I’ve since read in other people’s public wake-time experiments, started for the same reason mine was. Reading them back in one sitting, they sorted themselves into five categories almost without effort:

1. Bargaining excuses — eleven instances. “Five more minutes,” “I’ll make it up later,” anything that proposes a deal with a future version of me who does not actually exist yet.
2. Bodily complaints — three instances. Back, headache, general fatigue. Sometimes real, always suspiciously resolved by mid-morning.
3. Genuine external interruptions — three instances. The dog, the stomach bug, my niece. These are the ones where I have zero argument with myself; something outside my control happened and sleep suffered for it.
4. Rationalizations — one instance. Reframing the goal itself as unnecessary, after the fact, specifically so the failure stops counting as one.
5. No excuse at all — one instance. Day 12. Just a decision, named as what it was.

The rationalization category is the smallest by count but the one I trust least, because it’s doing something different from the others. Bargaining excuses at least admit the goal still stands — they’re stalling, not denying. Day 22’s “I don’t actually need to be up this early today” is a quieter kind of dishonest: it retroactively edits the reason I set the alarm in the first place, so that missing it stops looking like a failure and starts looking like a revision. I hadn’t decided the goal didn’t matter the night before, when I set the alarm with every intention of keeping it. I decided it at 6:11 a.m., half-asleep, specifically because deciding it let me go back to sleep with a clear conscience. That’s the one I’d flag if someone asked which entry in this log was actually lying to me.

There’s a piece I read a while back about what’s already decided before the alarm even fires — the idea that most of the outcome is set the night before, not in the fog of the ring itself — and this log matches that almost exactly. The mornings with a real excuse (the dog, the stomach bug, my niece) were unplanned by definition. Every other failure was a version of a decision I’d already half-made the previous night and just hadn’t admitted yet.

None of this required outsmarting myself with a better morning routine. What changed the ratio in the second half of the month wasn’t willpower — it was having somewhere to write the excuse down where someone else would read it before nine o’clock. A private note doesn’t do that. A note headed to three people who’ll see whether “five more minutes” turns into forty does something a little different to how honest you’re willing to be at 6:11 in the morning. I’d read something similar before about why self-employed people in particular struggle with this exact gap, since nobody’s actually checking — and a solo accountability log without an audience turned out to have the same hole in it. The excuses didn’t stop. But they got shorter, and fewer of them were lies.