Wind-Up challenge #1: we wake up at 5 am for a week

Hello Wind-Up readers,

Starting this issue, you can find a new multi-media column in the Wind-Up: a monthly Wind-Up challenge. This section will feature a brief description of the month’s challenge as well as a report on how it went. There will also be a video on our website of the participants’ experience with the challenge.

For our first challenge, Lily Conybeare, 12, Norah Judge, 12, and I had to wake up at 5:00 am every morning of the week. While that might sound like an easy task to some, I’m used to rolling out of bed at 6:45 most days—even 7:45 on late starts, so I was losing about an hour and 45 minutes of sleep a night.

I started my first morning with a Snapchat of a very annoyed Lily asking why she agreed to do this, and honestly, I felt the same way. But, as the morning progressed, I found that I had been more productive in a single morning than I had been over the whole weekend. To my surprise, the rest of the challenge followed suit. None of us gave up and we even went to the gym before school on Wednesday. 

Overall, the wake ups were hard but the time I had to relax, do homework, and have a productive start to my day made the lost sleep worth it in my eyes. In fact, the challenge has been over for two weeks now, but I am continuing to wake up at 5:00 am because I’ve learned that I prefer to have extra time in the morning.

If you’d like to help pick next month’s challenge be sure to look out for our issue three survey!