How I Became a Morning Person

I want you to take a moment and picture the best night of sleep you have ever had. Your eyes are closed and your body lies perfectly still. Every muscle is completely relaxed and peacefully rests on the softness your bed. The temperature in the room is a little chilly, but you are shielded by the warmth of your covers. Everything is perfect. You slowly and steadily inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale…

And then…BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

UGGGHHH it’s your alarm…

You fling your hand over and reach for the clock to hit SNOOZE. “I’ll give myself 5 more minutes of sleep,” you tell yourself. Maybe you can get back even a small fraction of the paradise you were experiencing just a few seconds ago…

What feels like only seconds later….BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

SNOOZE again. This time you aren’t even looking for paradise. That ship has sailed. The bed just feels so nice, and getting out of it would be the opposite of nice.

After repeating this several times you finally roll out of bed, probably running late at this point. You stumble into the shower, eyes half shut. You throw some clothes on and eat a very fast breakfast or maybe you skip because you’re out of time. You run out the door in a bad mood heading for work or school or wherever it may be, and once you get there, all you feel like doing is taking a nap.

Once you’re done with your commitments for the day, you get home and feel pretty worn out. All you want to do is relax and maybe watch some Netflix or do something that doesn’t require much brain power until it is time for bed.

Next day, repeat.

This was me.

Two months ago this was my life. Every single day looked something like this. And every single day I felt a little bit guilty. There were things I wanted to accomplish like maybe reading a book once in a while, or working out, or finding a hobby, but there was just no time in the schedule. Work was my priority and the evenings I was too spent to get much done. “I’ll do that this weekend,” I would tell myself. But somehow weekends felt even shorter.

I’ve often heard that most successful people wake up early and get all these things done before most of us are even reaching for the snooze button. But that just wasn’t me. I wasn’t a “morning person”. The idea of being a morning person was always intriguing though. I did some research on the internet and found some articles that basically say some people are morning people, some people are night owls. That’s just how it is. I felt like I fell somewhere in middle, but came to the conclusion that it is hard wired into us and there is no sense trying to change it. Just try to optimize the times you are most productive.

Then I read a book (first book I’d read in a couple years, I don’t consider myself to be a “reading person” either) called How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big where Scott Adams, describes his journey to creating Dilbert, one of the world’s most famous comic strips.

One of Adams’ keys is continuously developing your set of skills, whatever they may be, and combine them in unique ways. In order to do this, you have to maintain a high level of personal energy which can be devoted to learning and growing those skills. It was inspiring, but I was still pretty skeptical. You can’t just pull energy out of thin air. Then something Adams said caught my eye:

“You might not think you’re an early-morning person. I didn’t think I was either. But once you get used to it, you might never want to go back. You can accomplish more by the time other people wake up than most people accomplish all day,” — Scott Adams

Here was a successful person that didn’t think he was a morning person, and then just decided to become one, which he now considers to be a huge part of his success. Hmm, maybe it was possible.

Adams goes on later to describe how our bodies can be reprogrammed to do anything we want them to do, and we should experiment with our diet, exercise, sleep, etc. to see what gives us higher levels of energy.

Experimenting with sleep

So I decided that I would conduct an experiment on my own body. I would attempt to wake up early for a few days no matter how bad it felt and see what would happen. At first I woke up around 5:30 on a Monday morning and I was pretty tired, but I was at least energized by the idea of trying something new. I went on to shower, make breakfast, clean my apartment, do some reading and even drink some coffee (I’ve never really been a “coffee person”) to get a little bit of a boost. 2 hours after waking up, I left for work at my normal time.

I thought I would be exhausted at work, but surprisingly I was really awake. It felt good knowing that I had already accomplished a bunch of things before even arriving at work, where I normally started accomplishing things for the day. The momentum carried me through, and I got so much more done than normal.

By the end of that night I was really tired, and felt like going to bed early. It was weird having a desire to go to bed early, something I had never felt in my entire life. The other weird part was that I was excited to go to bed because I was excited for the next day to start, unlike before when I had dreaded it.

I started thinking more about my little experiment and wondered why I didn’t feel more tired at work. I normally would start to feel the most energetic at work around 10:00, when I was waking up at 7:00. What if I woke up at 5:00? Would I start to feel highest energy levels 3 hours later at 8:00 when I started work? BINGO! It all made sense.

Breakthrough

One day of this routine became 2 days, 2 days became a week, a week became a month, and a month became 2 months. I have since read 10 books, started exercising, making a larger and healthier breakfast, 4 weeks ago I started learning Vietnamese for fun, and the apartment has never been cleaner (just ask my wife). I feel like I am getting twice as much done at work, especially in the first few hours of the day. Oh, I also haven’t hit snooze once since I started!

Another added bonus is that the guilt I used to feel when doing “unproductive” things such as watching Netflix is totally gone. Once I got home from work I could completely relax and wind down knowing that I didn’t need to do anything else to make this a productive day.

Weekends too! I enjoyed the week days so much and got so used to waking up early that getting up early on a Saturday was easy, and I could do it without even setting an alarm.

You can do it too!

I hope you can look at my story and know that becoming a morning person is most definitely possible. I thought it would be extremely difficult, but it ended up being really fun. Now that I am used to it, I know that I never want to go back.

One thing I want to stress is that what worked for me might not work for you. Everyone’s bodies are different and everyone’s schedules are different. It is also helpful that my primary social structure, my wife, usually has to go to work earlier than I do, which means she is very supportive of going to bed earlier. You might be thinking, “Austin, you have a pretty boring life if you are able to go to bed early every single night,” but my general rule of thumb is that I will never sacrifice a social situation because I want to get to bed early. If I stay out late, I simply move my wake up time 30 minutes to an hour later and catch up on sleep I missed the next night.

I also don’t want you to feel like becoming a morning person is a requirement for living a productive life. Everybody is different and some people might have different routines that help them maximize their day.

I encourage you to conduct your own experiments to see if you have any breakthroughs like I did. If you have already found success in waking up early, or you have other routines throughout the day which help you be really productive, I would love to hear about it in the comments below!

You should follow me on Twitter because I like to share things I learn before I used to even be awake!