The Heroic Minute: How skipping the snooze button can transform your life every single day

Vermeer, A Maid Asleep

In my research for a non-fiction book I'm working on, I've been doing a lot of reading about habit-formation. From the recently published Better than Before; Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, by Gretchen Rubin, back over a hundred years to Charlotte Mason's groundbreaking Home Education lectures, there isn't much new in how we've come to understand habits between the turn of the twentieth century and now. For example, here's what Gretchen Rubin has to say about habits and decision making:

"I became convinced, however, that the defining aspect of habits isn't frequency, or repetition, or the familiarity of the cues for a particular behavior. These factors do matter; but in the end, I concluded that the real key to habits is decision making--or, more accurately, the lack of decision making. A habit requires no decision from me because I've already decided."

And here's Charlotte Mason's take:

"We are all mere creatures of habit. We think our accustomed thoughts, make our usual small talk, go through the trivial round, the common task, without any self-determining effort of will at all. If it were not so--if we had to think, to deliberate, about each operation...--life would not be worth having; the perpetually repeated effort of decision would wear us out."

They've definitely got a point. There's no decision-making, no virtue, involved in my saying grace before meals or wiping down the counters after I cook or reading before bed, because these actions are so ingrained in my habits that I no longer have to decide to do them.

But. There's one "habit" that seems to never, ever, ever feel decision-less, no matter how many times I repeat it. It happens every day, and every day I wage a tiny battle between my willpower and my pillow.

My alarm goes off at six a.m. And every single [blasted] morning, I think of a dozen excuses for why I should hit the snooze button and stay in bed. At least another ten minutes. Or maybe twenty or thirty. I didn't sleep well, because I had to nurse the baby more than usual. I think I might be coming down with something and need extra rest. My body needs to recover from the extra exercise I did yesterday. It's raining. (Hey, it seemed like a valid excuse at the time.)

I can't figure out why, no matter how many times I shove these excuses aside and pull myself out of bed, getting up at a certain time in the morning has never become a bona fide habit. Thankfully, I am not alone. I love St. Josemaria Escriva's advice for getting up:

"The heroic minute. It is the time fixed for getting up. Without hesitation: a supernatural reflection and... up! The heroic minute: here you have a mortification that strengthens your will and does no harm to your body."

There's something tremendously encouraging (and motivating) in the idea that every morning brings us the chance for heroic virtue. There's something tremendously comforting in the fact that every morning, at that time, that is the one mortification God is asking of me. Not losing a child, not facing homelessness, not being martyred for my faith...just getting out of a soft bed without complaining.

Habits are an excellent way to form our lives the way we want them to go, and making it easier to do good is great. But when habit-forming doesn't work...maybe there's a kind of blessing in that challenge. Instead of skipping something because it's hard--do it. Because it's hard. Because some of the very best moments in life involve decision and effort and risk, and risking a new day every single morning is a good way to get some practice in.

Maybe getting out of bed right away won't become a habit for you, either. But maybe shoving aside the excuses in your head will. Maybe it will make it that much easier to type the first word of a story or paint the first stroke of a portrait or knit the first stitch of a pair of mittens.

Or maybe it won't. And that's fine. Because every time you do it anyway, you're giving God a free gift of yourself. And God loves to work with what we give Him.