Why is it difficult to sleep in on the weekend?

You hear it everywhere: people waiting for the weekend to catch up on sleep that they may have missed during the week due to their jobs, kids, unexpected happenings, or whatever.  Maybe you’re one of these people?  You eagerly anticipate that first morning of the weekend when your alarm clock is off and you can stay in your bed all snuggly cozy with the comforter softly embracing your entire body and the pillow gently cradling your head.  But even though you have the time to sleep and desperately want to stay asleep, your body is telling you to get your assets out of bed and start your day.

Personally, I don’t get it.  During the week, I seldom feel like getting up when it’s time to get up (and for the record, I have a day job that I actually enjoy and look forward to each day).  I often feel I can keep on sleeping until whenever, and every week I tell myself that I’ll sleep in as long as I want on the weekend.  When the weekend comes, however, I automatically wake up at the time when I wake up to go work on the weekdays.  When that happens I start cursing my body for being “good” when I want it to be “bad.”  It doesn’t want to listen to me!  It’s sabotaging my sleep!  I hate it when it finally falls into a routine by the end of the week instead of having its act together at the beginning.

For ages, professionals and non-professionals have been giving advice on what to do or not to do in order to fall asleep and stay asleep.  We know the basics: drink warm milk, keep the room cool, eat or exercise hours ahead of going to bed, and so forth.  Experts at the Mayo Clinic have given their suggestions along with Dr. Weil and Lawrence Epstein for health.com.  WikiHow offers so many strategies for falling and staying asleep that their webpage alone will either put you to sleep or keep you awake worrying about sleep.  Sometimes, though, the basics just don’t do the trick.  You can try one thing or another to stay asleep and nothing is going to help.

In my case, I think my body just adjusts to my work schedule when there isn’t a need for it to follow it.  This is an issue of body, not mind, over matter.  Now, how to get mind over body is the question in staying asleep longer on the weekends.  Why can’t our bodies just listen to our brains and do what they’re told sometimes?

Why, indeed?