7 things not to do when you first wake up
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There's no one morning routine that works for everyone.
Maybe yours involves reading the news, or guzzling water, or dancing to pop music in your underwear. No judgment.
But there are certain morning mistakes that can set the stage for an unproductive, unenjoyable rest of the day.
To find out what those mistakes are, we checked out what scientists and other experts had to say about making the most (and the least) of the first few minutes after you wake up.
Below, we've rounded up seven common wake-up behaviors that you'll want to avoid.
Phalinn Ooi/flickr1. Hit the snooze button.
Sometimes (okay, all the time) your alarm goes off and you are just not ready to face the day yet. But resist the temptation to put off the inevitable by five or 10 minutes.
As sleep expert Timothy Morgenthaler told Business Insider's Jessica Orwig, "Most sleep specialists think that snooze alarms are not a good idea."
That's partly because, if you fall back into a deep sleep after you hit the snooze button, you're entering a sleep cycle you definitely won't be able to finish. So you'll likely wake up groggy instead of refreshed.
A better bet? Figure out how much sleep you need on a nightly basis and make sure to get that amount.
Flickr/bark
2. Stay curled up.
So you avoided the snooze (congrats!) and now you're lying awake in bed. Use this time to make yourself as big as possible — physically.
According to Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy, stretching out wide is a way to build confidence as you launch into your day.
Though it's impossible to say whether people feel good because they stretch out or vice versa, Cuddy explained during a talk at New York's 92Y that the people who wake up with their arms in a V "are super happy, like annoyingly happy."
By contrast, she said there's some preliminary evidence that people who wake up in a fetal ball "wake up much more stressed out."
m01229/flickr
3. Check email.
If you sleep near your phone (and most Americans do), it's easy to roll over and start mindlessly scrolling through your inbox.
Don't do it.
As Julie Morgenstern, author of the book "Never Check Email in the Morning," told The Huffington Post, if you start your morning this way, "you'll never recover."
"Those requests and those interruptions and those unexpected surprises and those reminders and problems are endless," she said. "There is very little that cannot wait a minimum of 59 minutes."
Instead, Morgenstern suggests that if you're going to do some work, make it a project that requires considerable focus.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider