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7 simple ways to shed your disgusting early-riser habits

Everywhere you look, there are tips for how to transform your shameful late-night, late-morning ways and become “a morning person.” Drop a Benjamin on a sunlight-mimicking alarm clock lamp from Sweden! Increase your wake-up time by five minutes a day until you simply spring out of bed at the ass-crack of dawn!

Well, here’s a fun tip for all you morning people: Everyone hates you.

Instagrammed sunrises. Your insistence that the best time to exercise is the instant you regain consciousness. Just stop. The rest of us are too busy mainlining caffeine to listen anyway, but if we paid you any attention, we’d slap you across your chipper face with the broadside of a bagel.

Here’s how to shed your irritatingly upbeat demeanor and join the rest of the self-loathing masses in hip, permanent exhaustion:

1. Set your alarm clock to an incredibly annoying ringtone. As soon as you hear it, awake in a cold panic and hit snooze as soon as humanly possible. Just anything to make it stop. Repeat 15 times.

2. When you begin to feel tired in the evening, resist the natural urge to call it a night. Turn on Netflix. Select a show—and this part is crucial—that is not good, but also not bad enough to easily turn off. Possibilities include: “The Blacklist,” “Dawson’s Creek,” “Criminal Minds.” Watch it until you doze off on the couch, then awake with a start around 3:30 a.m. and angrily crawl into bed.

3. In order to ensure you’re not tempted to get up and work out in the morning, hide one of your sneakers. In fact, hide both. Don’t wash your yoga pants. Ever. Own only sports bras in the wrong size, preferably too small.

4. If you have a dog who wakes you up with its sweet little tail wagging, trade with somebody who has a lazy cat. Cats don’t wake up early, and they will judge you hard for doing so yourself.

5. Stock your fridge with ingredients that could theoretically come together to make something resembling breakfast, but with a key item missing. For example, buy English muffins … but forget butter. Keep one empty box of granola bars high up on a shelf so that you forget about it and then excitedly reach for it every once in a while, only to discover that it is in fact empty and fling it back into the cabinet in disgust.

6. Do laundry (you’re not a monster), but be sure to deposit all of your clean clothes into a single heap somewhere in your house, extremely close to the pile of dirty clothes but not quite touching (again, not a monster). Fold some of them as if you intend to put them into drawers and closets. When getting ready in the morning, rummage through the pile for the specific item you’d like to wear. Spend a good 20 minutes searching for your maroon sweater. Give up, and wear that one ill-fitting button-down that will make you self-conscious all day.

7. Right before bedtime, scroll through the Facebook feeds of people you neither know nor like very well; bonus point if they are not terribly interesting, either. Do this until the creeping sense of existential dread about what we’re all doing with our short time on this earth overtakes your ability to focus and you pass out, with your phone screen shining brightly in your face until it dies. Another bonus point here if your phone is also your alarm clock.

Megan Bungeroth (@MeganBungeroth) is a writer and editor in Chicago.

And an FYI: Whether you’re a night person or a morning person, you don’t wanna miss a minute of 24 Hour: A Site for Sore Eyes. Join some of the biggest names in comedy and music for 24 hours of nonstop action Performers set to appear include Fred Armisen, Vanessa Bayer, Aidy Bryant, Kim Deal, Jack McBrayer, Thao Nguyen, Mike O’Brien and Jeff Tweedy. Mon. 11/23-Tues. 11/24, 6pm-6pm at Second City’s e.t.c. Theater. $20 at the door helps raise cash for needy Chicago families. Find out more at letterstosantachicago.com.