When you wake up is your morning
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a morning person.
I used to view what I now recognize as my natural state — being a night owl— as an abnormality that needed fixing.
To be fair, maintaining a sleep cycle completely opposite to society’s usual hours has been unsustainable. Meetings, appointments, and similar obligations typically happen during the day, and from experience, I can tell you that working through the night and skipping sleep to attend a morning appointment often ends in disaster.
Over the years, I’ve struggled with this nocturnal habit, and no matter how many early-to-bed, early-to-rise streaks I pull off, I eventually relapse into my insomniac tendencies.
This means that any day I wake up late in the morning (10:00–11:30 a.m.) or early afternoon (12:00–1:00 p.m.), I immediately think, ‘Oh my God, I’ve lost the whole day!’ I then beat myself up for not going to bed early, renew my resolution to be asleep by 11:00 p.m. latest, and start the day feeling defeated.
But, that’s no way to live.
I realize this now because a new perspective came to me this morning when I thumbed the side button of my iPhone and saw that it was past 11:30 a.m.
Just as my brain was about to slip into its default self-reprimanding mode, a thought crossed my mind: You have time. Take this as the beginning of your day. You can still do everything you want to. And with that, a blanket of reassuring peace settled over my heart.
Of course, I know I can’t do this every day — wake up whenever I please. My time is not mine alone; there are other people who expect or rely on me to show up at specific times. Work (remote with flexible hours, but meetings are mandatory), friends (they‘re always understanding, but if we have plans, I need to show up), and family — same applies to them.
So, there are days when I have to sleep early, and I can manage that as long as I’m not forcing myself to do it every single day. If I feel more productive at night, I can schedule days that are suitable for working late and make an extra effort to shut down early the night before any time-sensitive commitments.
As a side note, I even have a ‘Stop doing’ list, and one bullet point says: Stop staying awake past 10 p.m. It’s better to go to bed earlier, then get up at 4 a.m. for a good simulation of the serene nighttime, which is when I typically work best. But so far, that hasn’t really worked out for me.
I’m writing this in real time, so this is a path I’m currently walking and I can’t say I know where it’ll lead. But if there’s one thing I’m confident about, it’s that I stand to gain more by reframing my mindset.
Instead of thinking, ‘Oh my God, it’s so late! I won’t be able to get much done today,’ I can choose a different perspective: ‘It’s the start of my day; how do I get through what I need to do today?’
