My alarm rang just before 6am this morning and I can’t say I was too happy about it. I’ve had several glorious weeks of our children being on school holidays and while I’ve been working for most of that time, I have had the luxury of being able to choose my hours and for the most part didn’t need to be anywhere at any specific time. And while I haven’t really slept beyond 7:30 or 8:00am most days, my working hours have extended into the late evening with bedtime falling after midnight.
The old adage, ‘the early bird catches the worm’ preaches to us that early risers will be rewarded for rising with the sun but I confess however that I have always been more on the ‘night owl’ team. Perhaps it started from the time I was born; my mum tells the story of my birth around 1am in the quiet hours of a Sunday morning with only a midwife present – maybe this is my natural ‘awake’ time.
I had an early bedtime as a young child but moving into the latter years of high school and then university days gave rise to late-night study sessions. So much can be accomplished in the quiet hours when everyone else has gone to bed. And then work life sometimes required a 9pm finish time and social activities became something scheduled for the evenings with the occasional ‘all nighter’. Moving to Japan to teach English did not improve my chances of an ‘early to bed, early to rise’ routine as many of my shifts finished at 9pm and the culture of going out after work for dinner or drinks often meant bedtime came around 2am.
You would think that having children would have made a significant change to my schedule. It certainly has meant earlier mornings particularly when our kids were babies and even now as the morning school bell is a deadline we have to be up to beat each day. But over the years I have still found myself working into the early hours and rarely going to bed on the same day I wake up. My husband also has work that requires him to stay up late many nights to finish and sometimes I stay awake to keep him company. I think we call it ‘burning the candle at both ends’ which really just leads to ‘burn out’. It’s always so easy for me to stay up late. I love that quiet time and often like to sketch or doodle and listen to music. But am I living my best life and am I as productive as I could be? Probably not.
Last year I happened upon an audio book on You-Tube of Robin Sharma’s ‘5am Club: Own Your Morning, Elevate Your Life’. The book extols the virtues of rising at 5am each day and setting a morning schedule to change your life and become happier, healthier and more successful. Now, if you are like me, the only time I think getting up at 5am is a good idea is when you have booked an early morning flight to travel somewhere exciting. And even then you awake (after an unsettled sleep) with that awful feeling in your stomach and wishing that you had opted for an evening flight. Could I give it a try I wondered? No, there was no way. It was Winter, cold and still dark even at 7am when I was usually hitting the snooze button for 10 more minutes before I faced another rushed morning of making breakfast and school lunches in my usual flurry and game of beat the clock. But maybe I could try 6am.
So I committed to getting up at 6am for 2 months with the exception of Saturdays when I didn’t need to be up until 7 and Sundays when I didn’t have to set an alarm at all. I don’t think I will ever be one to jump out of bed at the first sound of my alarm but I managed most mornings to be up at 6 with only one hit of the snooze button ( I set my alarm for 5.50 to allow me this 10 minute reprieve.) Robin Sharma’s book recommends that the first 20 minutes of every morning be devoted to exercise and while I wasn’t exactly donning my sneakers and running around the block, I managed a few short cycles of lifting hand weights, worked my way up to 10 push-ups and finished with some yoga stretches on the floor. Then the next 20 minutes of the morning is my favourite part: meditation. The chance to sit and do nothing but breathe for 20 minutes – when else have I ever had this time in the morning to just do nothing but sit and be still? Such a calm way to start the day. And the next 20 minutes of the first hour of each day can be spent learning something new or reading or writing. I used this time to finish listening to the audio book and also found a couple more to listen to as well. I always think of reading as an activity for bed-time but most of my attempts to read in bed in the last few years have been one or two pages with half closed eyes and generally falling asleep.
So, after my trial at being an ‘early bird’ what can I tell you? Well, I think the first benefit is the general feeling of calmness that it creates in the morning. By the time I had to do my usual activites for the morning, I had already been up for an hour and was fully awake. It also guarantees that if you do no other exercise for the day, then you at least have 20 minutes of somehow moving and stretching your body ticked off the list and my body definitely felt stronger. After a week or so I was actually starting to wake up before my alarm went off but getting out of bed was still mostly hard until I was actually up each day. I feel like I was able to focus well when I worked in the mornings but no longer felt capable of working late into the evenings. I think it also showed that you can fit in something extra in your day just by spending 20 minutes each morning.
Of course I did slip back into my later waking time over the school holidays but one thing I did at least try to keep up is the morning exercise and meditation. I’m still not sure that one way is necessarily better than another. I think you can find the quiet ‘flow’ states late at night if that works for you and I think I will always struggle to be an early riser. Regardless of being an early bird or night owl, the one thing I have found most important above all is the importance of getting enough sleep. I guess now school is back on I will try the 6am start again but I will have to get better at the ‘early to bed’ mantra. I started writing this post early this morning and now I am finishing it close to midnight!
