That's why I get up at 4AM

I think I was inspired to write about waking up early by isa's article back in February, but apparently I never got around to finishing it:

For a long time I've been the kind of person who gets up at five. In recent years, I've justified this to myself by saying that I'm a morning person, that I do a lot of things in the morning. But I think more than anything it's just another one of those things I've done for so long that it starts to justify itself.

When I was in high school I remember watching a motivational video with some of my friends one evening, which we did, for some reason. At one point in it the speaker said "That's why I get up at 4 AM", and we all burst out laughing. Their reason being something to the effect of staying ahead of the competition. Envisioning a world in which you are in a sort of cosmic footrace with everyone who lives in the same timezone as you, and that by waking up early you're getting a head start on… your emails, or something. Something being a morning person at that age where you can kind of just like, not sleep, and somehow still function as a person, taught me was that you can sleep less only to a point. The less you sleep, the less you're able to do. When you wake up earlier, you aren't really "reclaiming" an hour of your day, you're just moving it around.

The reason I liked getting up at five was because at the time I lived with three other people, and for about an hour, I'd have the whole house to myself. It was serene in a way I'd never really felt before. One day, my brother got a job where he had to be on-site by 5:30 to open, which meant he needed the one shower first. For many cursed reasons, it was very important to me that the first thing I did after getting out of bed was to take a cold shower—that was like, the way I was able to keep myself awake so early, so you can imagine this totally threw me for a loop. But armed with my poor communication skills, I resolved to solve the problem the only way I knew how: by waking up earlier.

The following day, I got up at 4:30, and got into the shower first. Obviously my brother wasn't very happy about that, so for a few days we were locked in a sort of unspoken arms race over who could get up earliest. We didn't talk much to each other in the morning, probably in part because we were both half asleep, but I do still remember the baffled look on his face when I walked out of my room and he asked, "why the fuck are you up at 4 AM?"

In as much as I could say I won the arms race, one day, I got up at 3:30 AM intent on accepting this as the new normal. It was a hollow victory. If I'm being realistic with myself I probably wasn't getting to bed much earlier than midnight, so I must have gotten through the day by injecting caffeine straight into my veins. Needless to say it didn't last very long.

Thinking back on it, I think the most generally "well" I've felt in recent memory was when I had the flu back in the fall. It seems kind of surprising, but it makes a bit more sense when I consider that for the first time since I was a baby, I was getting to bed at 7 PM and waking up at 7 AM. That's how much sleep my body needed to recover. Even though I felt sick, I felt awake and alert. I figure that when I'm not sick, I probably need around 8 or 9 hours of sleep every night. In theory you can do this by being extra careful about getting to bed at the same time every night, but I find that's quite hard to do.

With enough practice, waking up early is easy. It takes a lot of habit formation, but there's a few things you can do to jump start the process. For one, you can put your alarm clock on the other side of your room to ensure you have to properly get out of bed before you can turn it off. By that point, you're up, and maybe even thinking rationally. Another thing that helps is to plan to do something important in that first hour you're awake, that way you feel responsible to stay up. A more cursed approach that's worked for me in the past is to wake up significantly earlier than you want for the first day, early enough to tap into that weird middle-of-the-night feeling where you're up and feel like you can't get back to sleep, and to use the tiredness you accumulate over the course of the day to get to bed on time the following evening.

The thing that actually gets me is that when you're in your twenties, the world doesn't go to bed at 8 or 9 PM. I might be able to get a few days into a strict sleep schedule, but inevitably I'm spending time with someone in the evening for whatever reason and I find it hard to pack it up at 7 PM to make sure I'm getting to bed on time. My compromise over the last year has been to wake up at 6, and to aim to be in bed between 9 and 10 PM. You still run into the same problem, but a little less so. Certainly less so than when I was a teenager and all my friends were staying up until 1 AM.

I do feel like that might be changing, though. Maybe it's just because the smoke's been so bad these past few weeks it's hardly worth going outside at all, let alone going out. But I do still miss that early morning feeling. The circumstances of my life are different now, but I still think there's something special about having the time to relax before work, rather than rushing out the door. But we'll see. What matters more than when you're sleeping is getting the sleep you need.

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