Part 1 – The call to adventure
We live in a world of endless possibilities, endless potential experiences and encounters, with something fascinating always only a walk, watch, or page-turn away. We also live in a world of limited time. Work dominates the day; evenings and weekends become sacred time to spend with partner, family, and friends; any remaining time is sapped by sleep, chores, or home-improvements. And that’s before the infini-scroll of social media comes into play. The result is everyone has something they’d rather be doing – writing, reading, catching up with old friends, or maybe just sitting in the bath. And everyone reminisces about the time when they had time – the long days of childhood and adolescence when we had all the time in the world to explore and adventure, forge friendships, fall in love, think, philosophise, make mistakes with no consequences, or just lie in the grass and think about all the things we still had to look forward to.
Childhood gives a false sense of time, both because you literally have more free time than at any other point in your life, but it also feels like more free time. Even though we may acknowledge the effects of rose-tinted spectacles, it doesn’t help shake that niggling feeling that the grass used to be greener. And that maybe it’s greener elsewhere? With this constant feeling of restlessness and disquietude, it’s little wonder that we are suffering a mental health epidemic: stress, tiredness, loneliness, pressure – these are the watchwords of the day.
As the hours become more and more precious, our resistance to quick-fixes and silver-bullets weakens. I, for one, began to notice a trend. If you want to be successful, and achieve things, you need to be getting up early. And I mean early! The allure of the glamorous Influencer practicing yoga as the sun comes up caught my eye. Podcasts with names like ‘the 5AM Miracle’, promised to help me “bounce out of bed with enthusiasm, create powerful lifelong habits, and tackle your grandest goals with extraordinary energy”. All of a sudden sound this sounds like essential listening. I noticed the listicles praising those who wake up early – the high-achievers, the success-stories, people like Tim Cook, Michelle Obama, and Richard Branson. It all made sense now – idioms like ‘the early bird catches the worm’, and ‘early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise’ have stood the test of time because they’re true, surely?
I want to be successful! I want to be a high achiever! I want to have time to exercise, write, read, without having to sacrifice other aspects of my life! Early starts are the way to cure that restlessness, that feeling that you’re missing out on opportunities and experiences. So, I decided to do an experiment. I read Dave Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’, listened to the Audiobooks of two sacred productivity texts (Triggers: Creating Behaviour That Lasts – Becoming the Person You Want to Be, and the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People). I bought a premium to-do list app subscription. I read blogs, watched videos, subscribed to Podcasts. And I set my alarm for 5AM. And the results – well, they were surprising…
Part 2 – Crossing the threshold
My role-model was the typical ‘productive person’. I imagined them thusly: at 5am they wake up bright-eyed and bushy tailed, drinking in the morning sun whilst the rest of the world sleeps. Mist is hanging in the trees, and the frosty ground is burning deep orange in the first rays of the day. This go-getter is sipping their cup of ginseng tea, warming up for a morning yoga session. They’ve already meditated, made a healthy breakfast, and blended a lunchtime smoothie. All that’s left to do is read a book, work on a side-hustle, and prepare for the rest of the day. But not before uploading a photo of that frosty sunrise to Instagram. After all, they’re an early bird, and want to show themselves catching the worm!
My first week or so of trying this yielded mixed results. I rather naïvely thought that by getting up earlier I would have more time. Whilst I would wake up feeling fine and spend the morning getting things done, I would then spend the whole afternoon in a zombie-like state and be falling asleep on the sofa at 9pm. It turns out that when people say: ‘early to bed and early to rise’, the early to bed isn’t optional. It makes perfect sense when you think about it: there are the same number of hours in the day, and your sleep requirements remain the same. Those extra hours of awake time in the morning must be paid for. The amount of sleep you need is not dictated by what time you get up in the morning. It is the result of a complex mix of genetics, environment, hormones, age, diet, all of which combine to give everybody their own unique circadian rhythm.
The brain similarly has a natural rhythm. At the start of the day the pre-frontal cortex is particularly active. This is the bit of the brain dedicated to decision making, filtering your wild and abstract thoughts to ensure your actions are subject to social ‘control’. It differentiates conflicting thoughts, and determines subjective states like good, bad, better, best. In other words, it’s the bit that’s worrying about achieving your goals without embarrassing yourself. It’s late at night (or under the influence of alcohol) when your pre-frontal cortex is sleepy that crazy inspiration pours forth without concern for consequences or quality. This explains why I’ve always found the night to be more inspiring, when I’ve had my most beautiful moments of creativity, when I feel the juices flowing, when I’ve blitzed through pages of prose in a single sitting. This was a problem, as one of the reasons I wanted to start getting up earlier was to give me more time to write, edit, draw; in other words, follow my creative passions. But I found working on these projects in the morning intolerable: I would agonise over every decision, second guess myself constantly, becoming my own harshest critic.
It was clear that the morning was not the time for creative work. But I did find early starts to be beneficial in other ways. Because of my over-active frontal cortex, the mornings were a great time for me to get organised, and to plan my day. It was the best time for me to exercise, which woke me up and meant I could walk into work with confidence (read: smugness). I also found myself spending much of the mornings undertaking ‘productive procrastination’ – tidying, cleaning, sorting. Not strictly necessary things, but it feels nice to know you’re not coming home to outstanding housework. And finally, the value of having time in the mornings for a leisurely breakfast cannot be overstated.
“If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed …
And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made … and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.”
Admiral William H. McRaven
Part 3 – Revelations
I wanted to do this to recapture the magic of all-nighters. That objective, certainly, was a failure. But something I realised along the way is: why try and recapture that magic when it already exists? The calm stillness of the night air, the peacefulness of a world asleep, the monochrome glow of moonlight and starlight still existed, I’d just slipped out of the habit of finding it. Finding it again might be more difficult in adulthood, then again, it’s no more difficult than rearranging your life to fit in in 5AM starts.
The most important thing I learned was to know yourself. Experiment and explore how your body and your mind react to different rhythms and schedules, and plan your day accordingly. Because everyone is different. Researchers looking into sleep patterns refer to an individual’s sleep cycle as their ‘chronotype’. A chronotype is impacted by a variety of things, including genetics, hormones, and environmental factors, and there is a whole host of research about the differences between chronotypes, and what that means for individuals. For example, teenagers tend to have a later chronotype than adults, and some schools have looked at shifting start times later to better coincide with their students’ most alert periods, and to try and increase the amount of sleep they get.
Unfortunately, modern society has a 9-5 mentality that favours morning-types over evening-types. This starts at school with morning-types getting better grades, and transitions into the workplace where those allowed to work when they’re most active tend to be more successful, get promotions, and earn more. And there is a pervasive sense in society that those who can get up early, with energy and motivation, are somehow ‘better’ people,
That’s not to say there aren’t successful night-owls: Winston Churchill, Bob Dylan, Flaubert, Prince, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Toulouse Lautrec all favoured the evenings. A very quick, unscientific comparison of this list and the one of morning people might draw a conclusion that successful business-people are morning people, and successful creative ones are the opposite. Or maybe it’s just that creative jobs tend to be less locked-in to a ‘normal’ working day. Either way, you’re going to struggle to achieve your true potential when the World’s schedule doesn’t match up with your own clock. Ultimately, successful people find what works for them and makes society fit their schedule, and not the other way round.
Part 4 – Return Changed
I started this experiment after being caught in the trap of wanting to be more ‘productive’. I wanted to achieve more, create more, become a better person. It stemmed from a restlessness, that feeling that you could be better if you only tried a little harder, or woke up a bit earlier, or procrastinated a little less. But perhaps the mental-health epidemic we’re seeing at the moment is not just a consequence of our lives being busier, our time being more stretched, but also the constant bombardment of messages that we’re not good enough, we should be trying harder or doing more.
The idea of ‘productivity’ is an unhealthy weapon of capitalism. How can you peddle the sales of productivity manuals, garner likes, watches, or listens without telling people they need to be better. It’s from exactly the same play-book as the beauty industry, the fashion industry, the fitness industry. That’s not to say I’m anti self-improvement, on the contrary I think it’s vital. But I’ve learnt that there are more ways to judge success than being prolifically ‘productive’. Just by existing, you are successful. Your own story your, interactions, conversations, jokes, fears, reactions, feelings, emotions, all add up to success, whether you rise at 5am or midday.
Did you know that the saying “the early bird catches the worm”, isn’t specifically advising anyone to be a morning-person. It actually means don’t put something off, be pro-active: the one to do something first will be the one to benefit from it. So be the one to do this first: stop worrying about productivity, and just do what makes you happy. Be reflective, learn your body and your mind’s natural cycles. Understand when you work best and know that motivation, energy, and emotions aren’t anything to do with will-power. They come and go, unbidden.
For me, some things are best left for the small hours in the candlelight. The satisfying weariness at the end of a busy day brings forth unbidden reflections and thoughts, and bursts of inspiration. Realising that made me happier to enjoy the mornings for what they are: the start of the day, when all is full of hope and promise. When it’s easy to see the path ahead, the clear air not muddied by indecision or confusion. A time to plan and prepare. A time to lay-in and relax. A time to enjoy the most important of all things – a leisurely breakfast.