Why We Get Up in the Morning

I just finished reading the book “My Morning Routine”. It was suggested by a WeChat channel I follow and the topic certainly sounds like one I’d be interested in. It’s a collection of interviews about the morning routines of some successful people. You shouldn’t expect too much - I didn’t, but it can be inspirational, to a limited extent. Unfortunately I’m a very slow reader, thus it doesn’t seem worth my long reading time.

I decided to write something about the book while in the middle of the read. At first, I was thinking about a summary. But then I was captured by this idea of why people get up in the morning, at all. What brings us to rise every day and to sleep every night. I realized it’s not the morning routine that’s important, but the day you are going to spend. If you want to achieve something during the day, naturally gradually you develop habits around it to help you do that. Whatever the something is and whatever the habits are.

Back to the book:

- Most of the interviewees don’t have a 9 to 5 job as most people do. Their morning routines are surely informative but can be unrelatable as well. Better focus on the takeaways. - The content is highly repetitive. It turns out there are only so many flavors for the morning routine.

Building blocks of the morning routine (almost inevitably you must get up early):

- Read a book: a real, honest-to-God book as the first interviewee in the book put it, often non-fiction and/or non-work related - Workout - Home: yoga, body weight training (push up, plank, stretch) - Out: run, walk (with partner, with dog, or alone) - Gym - Swimming - Meditate - Drink, eat - Check news, social media, emails

Copy, or move, your morning routine to night and it becomes your night routine, if you prefer that.

To make your falling asleep and carrying out morning routine easier, follow these tips before bed:

- Make a list of to-dos and get them out of mind. - Lay out the clothes you are to wear for the next day; if you workout in the morning, lay out the sportswear too. - Leave your phone alone.

A key idea worth noting is to reduce decision fatigue. Laying out clothes beforehand, having simple, even same breakfast and so on all help maintain your limited willpower for your main focus.

Other dos and don’ts:

- Don’t snooze. The reason is straightforward, but you do what you please. - Don’t dive into your phone first thing you wake up. - Making bed is a good practice to mark the start of your morning.

This is a brief look into what is going on in the book and about the morning routine. Details are lost. If you are interested, go read the book. But like so many books out there, it has chapters that are variations of the same theme over and over again. Put it down wherever you start to get bored and you wouldn’t miss much.

What seems more interesting to me, rather than morning routines, is what these successful people do, for a living. They are founder and CEOs of this and that; they are writer, artist, designer, photographer, musician; president, professor, general, athlete. You can be successful in many ways, but it almost always involves a business of your own, may it be a company, a website, a community to run or a writing project, a concert tour. In fact, it's not even about the business. It’s about the time. You are the boss of your time. Now you’ve got the whole day in your hand to plan. You must self-impose a structure to it. And if you push more, not necessarily more tasks but certainly more efficiency, into your day, hopefully you achieve more. That’s why morning routine is helpful to these successful people. Nevertheless, you don’t have to be a freelancer or a founder of anything to own your time. If you like your 9 to 5 job and willingly put your time in it, that’s good enough.

Unfortunately not everyone can say they like their job. Accept it or change it, easier said than done. So every weekday morning they sleep to the last minute to catch the bus and return home physically and emotionally drained, incapable of doing anything but lying down and watching TV shows. Weekends are for more sleeping, more lying in bed with phones. After all, what’s the point of preparing yourself for a job, or a life actually, you don’t care about or even hate? In the worst case, as anyone who has experienced depression can testify, the first big challenge of the day is to get up. Why bother?

Why do people get up in the morning at all? Isn’t it because we believe good things will happen and we are here to make them happen. We get up because we want to achieve something and there indeed is something for us to achieve. If you are in a bad position right now, accept it or change it - eventually you will do either. I say try changing it. And morning routine, or night routine if you wish, is a great start point to take control of life. It can be one thing you look forward to for the coming new day. It can be the small step you take to better yourself for the challenges in life.

I had my best morning routine while I was out of a job. Unsurprising. That’s when I had all my time at my disposal. I got up early, had a small bowl of oatmeal, workout for an hour, took a shower and then ate a full breakfast. It’s kind of for nothing, because I wasn’t doing anything during the day except reading constantly. But it’s the morning routine that injected discipline into those days. That, and to eat and sleep regularly. Together they guarded the bottom line so one day didn’t get mixed with the other to be a long vague period of time and I felt refreshed most of the days.

Now with a job, I keep my morning simple. It’s a 20 minute walk from home to office. And I move workout to night. Sometimes I miss it, and I don’t punish myself for that. I’ll try again tomorrow. What’s more important is to hold on to the habit and keep the rhythm going. Finally, as you can tell, I still read.

Here is my one takeaway from the book. With or without a certain routine, better be proactive in life. The sun rises. Get out of bed. Make moves. We’ll see where it goes.