A Night Owl’s Guide To Waking Up Early
The hustle culture has sold us on the idea that starting your day before dawn will earn you a spot among the go-getters, the high-achievers and the truly hardcore trainers. But do the hours you keep really make a difference? MH’s night owl spent a month transforming himself into an early bird to find out
The sun was barely rising, but I’d already downed my coffee, laced up my trainers and grimaced my way through a dumbbell circuit. With the rest of the world still asleep, I found myself hungry, slightly jittery and trudging into a self-prescribed ice-cold shower, which caused me to yelp like a wounded animal.
I was just one week into a month-long quest to test as many scientifically backed practices as I could for becoming a productive “morning person” – which is something I’ve never really been but have been told (by social media, regular media and, um, everyone I’ve ever met) is the key to killing, crushing or otherwise surviving the wild ride that is 2020. Think of this as morning culture 2.0, a sort of New Age approach to productivity embodied by everyone from the Rock, whose 4am workouts hit Instagram like a sweaty fever dream, to Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, whose ritual involves dawn meditation. The list of early risers with mornings tagged as “me time” includes former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and Disney’s executive chairman, Bob Iger. Both rise at around 4:30am, but neither – and this is the kicker – seems to mind it. In fact, they seem to like it.
All of this feels like a natural extension of today’s prevailing hustle culture: our society’s collective inclination to celebrate long working days as a badge of honour. But what about all the data telling us that most men aren’t getting enough sleep? (The Sleep Council prescribes seven to nine hours a night, but the average man barely catches six and a half.) Or the countless studies that show how too little sleep and too much productivity can quickly spiral into burnout and depression? Is it possible to become a morning person without torturing yourself and – given what we know about the importance of sleep – do we really want to?
I had a lot of questions. After a career move, I’d started working late, sleeping late and feeling hopelessly behind. It was no way for a grown man to live, so I asked half a dozen researchers to see if they could help me get back in gear. I also reached out to a former night owl named David Osborn, co-author of the self-help book Miracle Morning Millionaires, who credits changing his sleep-awake cycle with supercharging his career in real estate. “Mornings are everything for me now,” he says. Those mornings often include reading, making his family breakfast and hot-tubbing with his wife. (Yes, seriously.)
With Osborn and co as my guides, I spent 30 days rethinking the way I slept, woke up, ate, exercised, “got centred” and generally worked in pursuit of a better me. Here is what I learned.