I use to hate waking up in the morning, if it was before 9 I cursed the world. I think having to be forced to wake up early to go to school or work as a kid was what made me dread the wee hours of the morning. As I got older and as I had to work manufacturing jobs I would regularly have to wake up between 4-6 am, I hated it with a passion. For someone who has a tendency to stay up late, waking up early doesn’t work so damn well, it’s more of an inconvenience than anything else. However, now that I am trying to pursue creative endeavors and start a business I’ve been getting up earlier and earlier than usual so that I can get everything done in the morning that I want to, now getting up early gives me a jump start to my day and moves me in the right direction. I start off with early successes.
The progression that I took when I started to get my health and life moving back into a positive direction started with biking in the morning, some simple exercise. In order for me to do this I had to start getting up an hour earlier so that I could fit in the the exercise into the morning. I went from rolling out of bed at 9am to start getting out of bed at 8am. This was great, wasn’t too early and I got my body moving early and it set a positive precedence for the rest of the day. I was taking bad habits and turning them into good habits. When you start seeing results in the good habits you start wanting more of them.
When I decided that just exercising my body wasn’t enough to be successful and wanted to start making bigger leaps in a given direction the natural progression was to exercise my mind. This was a two pronged approach, avoid junk reading (email, social media, ‘news’) and write 1000 words every morning. This wasn’t an insignificant leap, this was not only changing what I do in the mornings but completely changing my entire days schedule and retraining myself that years of bad habit had entrenched in my psyche. In order for me to be able to add reading and writing to my morning routine along with my exercising I needed to carve out another hour of time. I couldn’t carve it out after my exercising, unfortunately I have to go to my day job, so the only place I could carve out that time was by waking up earlier. 7am it is. I committed to getting up at 7am and it was relatively painless, shockingly enough.
Now I’ve been pretty use to only sleeping a handful of hours each night but as I grew older and started to need my brain more in the morning I needed to get more sleep, a minimum of 7 hours. If I don’t sleep at least 7 hours each night my brain feels hazy and unproductive. This meant that I no longer could stay up to 1 or 2 in the morning, what seemed to be my natural hours of operation. The other effect of being a more productive person was that now that I carved out an extra 2 hours in the morning and added more productive activities in the morning I needed to sacrifice 2 hours at night, not too difficult but a big change. Actually it has been great and has reinforced the good habit building that I have set out to accomplish.
But wait, I was having all this success in the mornings, why couldn’t I have this success in the evenings? So I said ‘fuck it’ lets do some stuff at night too. Blogging, website management, photography, reading, and business development quickly filled up the evening slot and all at the same time. I allow my evenings to be a bit more unproductive and less rigid but most of it is consumed with things that will bring value and substance to my life. TV shows, social media, and junk food blogs quickly got pushed to the wayside and replaced with good habits.
Waking up early had been the catalyst to spur real change in my life. The weird thing is, I still don’t feel like it has been enough, I think I need more time in the morning. I never thought that I would be the type of person who would be willing to wake up early all on my own. Even on weekends I’m up by 7am to jump start my day. If I’m up later than usual I don’t sleep in any later than 8am, if I do by happenstance I just feel unproductive and lazy. I’ve actually been considering to give myself another hour each morning so I can work on some other projects. It seems that the morning is the most productive and creative period of time throughout the day for me. It’s the time of the day that my momentum, dedication, and creativity is the strongest. The minute I get to work it just drains my productivity, will, creativity and by the time I get home, I’m only running at 50% or less.
It’s been pretty amazing to be see the reinforcement of healthy and good habits. I feel much better throughout the day and my mental state has been much more at peace. Having many victories before 10am gives me the confidence that if nothing else good happens that day at least I have won at something. Each morning I start off with wins, this is important to a successful day. When I use to consume my mornings with bullshit emails, social media, and fear mongering ‘news’ I sacrificed my whole day to negativity and unconstructive habits. My mornings were consumed with negativity and no longer provided a good platform for a good day. Those wasted mornings carried throughout the day. The opposite is extremely true, the good habits and exercise I have developed in my early mornings has helped to carry with it positivity through my whole day. It has helped make the world I live in more simplistic and less stress free environment. I have a presence of mind about me that the little things just don’t bother me the way they use to when all I was doing was negative morning routines. Early life in the mornings are quite beneficial and quite good, to be honest I’m loving waking up early. You should give it a try.