Morning Person

I never intended to become a morning person, but health issues pushed me into it. Evenings were a time of exhaustion, diminishing resolve, and brain fog, and so the first four hours after waking became the time of day when I brought my best self to a project.

For the first year, I fought against that. Loathed the early starts, focused on all the pop science write-ups about the research into larks and night owls, embraced the snooze button and the long sleep in. I was nostalgic for the kind of writer—the kind of person—I’d been before evenings became a nightmare. I convinced myself the problems with evenings were a temporary aberration, soon to be conquered. One day, I my creativity would fire up around 10 PM and I’d spend the next eight hours writing into the wee hours. One day, I would set my routine to the rhythms of a night owl and all the work would get done. This person I was will soon be who I am again.

It didn’t work out that way. Chronic health conditions get that name for a reason, and you manage rather than cure. Evenings were lost to me.

Things got better when I leaned into mornings: rolling out of bed as soon as I wake up, picking a wake-up song to energise my day, setting the tone of the next twenty-four hours by picking a focus—writing, reading, housework, or clearing publishing tasks—and did a short half-hour sprint on that project before making coffee and eating breakfast.

Somewhere along the way, I became a morning person. Focused on nailing that wake-up routine and transition into work. Full of beans in the first four hours of the day, itching to get started.

Socially, we’re conditioned to take a dim view of working against our natural inclinations. The heroes of our cultural narratives buck the system and break free of constraints, embrace their true paths and defy conventions. “Be true to yourself,” we’re told, “and the world is your goddamned oyster.”

But there are two things that inform our self-perception: our natural inclinations, and what we do on a given day. One is informed by who we are in the past, the other by who we hope to be in the future.

When shit hits the fan, the biggest challenge is letting go of the older vision of who you used to be and the vision of the future you’d been chasing. But cleaving to that is nostalgia, and one important aspect of nostalgia is that the past is irrecoverable.

Take a breath. Let that version of yourself go. See yourself for where you are right now, and the version of yourself that can still be. Then take the next step towards that person, day by day, hour by hour.

Even if it means becoming a morning person.

RECENT READING THAT INFORMED THIS POST

• Who Are You, Really: The Surprising Puzzle of Personality, Brian R. Little (Book)
• I turned to The Secret Life of Us for warm nostalgia. Instead, I found jarring memories, Lisa Portolan (The Conversation)