On Early Morning Wake Ups

The difficulty in early morning rises

When I reflect on my life transitioning from university student to young working professional, what I feel changes the most is my value for time. Gone are the luxurious days of a flexible schedule: classes, problems sets, and exams I can selectively choose to study at whatever depth of precision while balancing priorities in fitness, friends, and extra circulars. Those daily dynamics are replaced by certainty and a fixed schedule- for 5 days a week, I will be working between 8:30am-5:30pm, no if, ands, or buts. So now, this leaves me with a challenge, which I find utmost fun and fulfilling: how do I optimize the rest of my weekday and weekends? 

Over the course of the past year I have experimented with an earlier wakeup time. A typical day starts at 5:30am: I wake up and, with all my lifting accessories laid out on my office table from the prior night, trek towards the gym for my 2 hour powerlifting training session. To ensure proper rest for the early wake up time, I aim to get 7.5 hours of sleep, dimming lights and removing electronic screens at 9:30pm and sleeping at 10pm. While this routine is often deemed as the secret sauce to an uber productive day (one that is not easily achieved by mere mortals as perpetuated by this Wall Street Journal article where I first got the inspiration to write this), I want to elaborate and respond with some thoughts. 

First of all, it is important to establish the basis that this early wakeup time is not special, despite whatever is spewed by those who do not wake up as early. I found really quickly that it does not pre-determine nor guarantee boosted productivity throughout the day. Particularly, when waking up early, I am much more susceptible to poor sleep or a lower than expected sleeping duration, which leads to drowsiness throughout the day, if I do not diligently go to bed. Certainly, it’s astonishingly easy to get distracted and end up sleeping at 11pm or later. Assuming if I got high quality sleep- I still have the same amount of waking time is regardless of sleeping schedule. If I slept for 8 hours, I have 16 hours in the day to be productive, which means I can theoretically be equally productive waking up at 5:30am or 8:30am, assuming there are no constraints by external scheduling (ie: start time for work). My productivity in a given day is dependent upon how effective I am in those 16 hours.

Now with that said, I have found an early wake up time to be mostly beneficial with my effectiveness in those 16 hours. Though I acknowledge there are probably dozens of studies out there exploring the positive impact of early wakeup to our circadian rhythms, exposure to sunlight, or whatever other biological mechanism, I find my benefits to be mostly around framing- how I view myself waking up early and its relative difficulty to the rest of the waking day.

Despite having a consistent schedule for a while now, I still find waking up early difficult. When the alarm sounds and I awaken to the cold, dark world that is the early autumn morning, the last thing I want to do is leave the warm comfort of my welcoming bed. An internal battle between excuses and discipline ensues, to which the bruised and bloodied discipline wins under the certain premonition that sleeping in would only result in the utmost disappointment. Soon, this difficulty to wake up is compounded by the sting of cold morning air and the strain of unforgiving metal on unsuspecting muscles which were resting in bed only moments ago.

This difficulty to wake up is surely welcomed once I wrap up my workout at 8:30am, when I am alert, freshened up, and sitting in office, confident for victory for the remaining onslaught of the day. Nothing will match the daily battle against the intrinsic enemy of weakness when waking up and working out while the world is asleep. And when inevitably something difficult does arise, I refuse to lose- I did not wake up this early and change my life style to simply roll over in defeat.

This victory in the morning is ultimately why I found an early wake up time to be effective; however, it is not without its significant drawbacks, the most significant being a fundamental mindset change required for the upkeep of daily discipline for those early mornings where weakness is the most fearsome. Not divergent to my university freshman and sophomore days where only religious time investment can keep the fire hydrant stream of problem sets and midterms at bay, my waking hours lean towards more individual productivities- fitness, reading, writing, sewing- for which I can tightly control my time allotment, and away from my senior year habits of impulsive socializing and outings, which end in late nights and closer connections. There is not only a loss of some deeper connections, but also a change of habit to avoid headaches from the conflicting circadian rhythm and fomo from the realization (whether it be true or not) that everyone else out there is having so much fun while I turn my day in early, (this in some part motivated my thoughts on avoiding social media). It’s seemingly a requirement for my mindset becomes more monk-like: an increased awareness towards the value of time, resulting in the active focus for clarity and discipline to execute the early morning wake up routine in the hopes of enhanced productivity towards greater meaning, which is obscured and fuzzily projected into the forthcoming future.

Is this tradeoff and focus worth it? I’m not sure, but it certainly minimizes the thought of “what more can I have done”, if I, by the smites of my own controllable discrepancies or uncontrollable fates, fall short of accumulating true meaning in life. It also certainly increases the chances that my younger self is proud of the person he is to become, that everything he worked for does not lead to a bloated life of satisfaction where rewards are comfortably reaped with no significant effort and stressful stimuli in the hypnotizing lull of common experience. 

By all means, the difficulty of waking up early does not lie in the physical waking up. Though not frictionless, it is relatively straightforward. Just turn off the alarm and get up. The difficulty for me indeed lies in the mindset shift towards resisting degradations which naturally occur if habits are not monitored~