How did you end up becoming a morning person?

i got an annoying gf and woke up early to have some alone time. She eventually dumped me but i kept the morning routine.

In your mid-20s you didn't have a smart phone. Stop using it after 7pm and you'll become a morning person again.

Also early 30s but have always been a morning person. Partly because of my job and partly because I think traffic is an abject waste of time. Are you still tired after 8 hours of sleep?

One of my friends absolutely swears by his "light therapy lamp." It's a bight "therapeutic" light that comes on in the morning with his alarm clock. He said it's made a huge difference in his ability to wake up feeling ready to start the day.

I'm 61 and I've been a morning person all my life. Even when I was a kid I could never sleep past about 7 am. One year in college I had a job that went until midnight five days a week and I still never slept past about 6:30 am (and was sleep deprived all year). I live on the west coast and I love traveling east because it's always easy for me to wake up earlier, but really tough to stay up later. I now regularly go to bed around 9:15 and wake up around 4:45, and run first thing in the morning while my husband is still asleep.

Anyone can adjust one's habits, but I think real morning people are born, not made.

amkelley wrote:

Anyone can adjust one's habits, but I think real morning people are born, not made.

I think this is probably true.

Being totally honest, a good part of me thinks non-morning people are just undisciplined or always thought it was "cool" to stay up late, but, being fair, that's probably a prejudice as I am a morning person. Science seems to confirm there are biological differences. (Granting that, I'm still not sure I've met a non-morning person who I would call disciplined. I'm sure they exist.)

I've been getting up around 6 AM since kindergarten. My mom is that way, too. My dad used to get up at like 4 AM for work as a trucker, maybe it was even earlier. So, I grew up in an environment where getting up early was the norm.

A while ago, an old classmate of mine was trying to clean himself up, quit alcohol and drugs, lose weight, start working out, etc. He said he didn't really need a training partner, he needed a "get-my-rear-end-out-of-bed" partner. My response was that you just have to want it bad enough, instead of relying on external motivators. When I was trying to BQ, I got up as early as 3:30 AM in order to get my longer/harder runs in before sunrise during the summer.

Running Doubles in college and then my job

I got a job that started at 8am, then moved to overtime--which meant starting an hour earlier.

I wanted to keep the job. Et voilà!--I was a morning person.

sandman wrote:

In my mid-20's, I was a morning person. Loved getting up early, having coffee, run, shower, etc. Felt great.

Fast forward to my early 30's. I feel terrible waking up. I just find it impossible. Of course, new job and some later nights contribute to this. But good lord, it's been rough the past few years.

Any decent ideas?

Get a wife and kids.. You will relish the time in the morning before they are up.. quiet time to do your thing, (including working out) and get ready for the day.

Teens.. chores.

20s.. ambitious academics

30s.. ambitious workplace

40s.. running

Have a kid. Up at 4:30 every day - in a good way.

MorningPerson wrote:

amkelley wrote:

Anyone can adjust one's habits, but I think real morning people are born, not made.

I think this is probably true.

Being totally honest, a good part of me thinks non-morning people are just undisciplined or always thought it was "cool" to stay up late, but, being fair, that's probably a prejudice as I am a morning person. Science seems to confirm there are biological differences. (Granting that, I'm still not sure I've met a non-morning person who I would call disciplined. I'm sure they exist.)

Most morning people's natural tendency is to assume that if they can do it, then anyone else should be equally capable of it. It's crazy for them to assume that everyone else is just like them, but yes there is a natural bias because they can feel a lot better about themselves if they believe that anyone who's not a morning person is just being lazy. I'm glad at least some people are becoming aware of some of the scientific research, but even so you can see in the quotes above that there's still a bit of a tendency to look down on people who aren't morning people.

I've struggled with this all my life. Even when I was a little kid, my parents would make me go to bed at whatever time was considered reasonable, but I couldn't sleep. So I would just lay there in bed, wide awake for hours. My parents were very strict, so they wouldn't budge on what time I was supposed to be in bed. But they couldn't make me sleep. So they would just say I had to be--I can't remember if it was in my bed or just in my room--with the lights off. Which meant I couldn't read, but I could listen to the radio.

I had a theory that if only the daily cycle was like 28 hours long instead of 24, then I would be much better off. I always wanted to be awake longer when I was awake, and then once I was asleep I wanted to sleep longer. I had many such ideas as a kid, but adults always thought I was crazy. Then just recently I saw that someone did a scientific study where they isolated people from any clues about time of day (e.g. light, temperature) and observed their sleep cycle. They determined that the average person's natural cycle is actually a little longer than 24 hours. And that's the average person. I'm definitely not in the middle of the bell curve on this particular metric. So my idea that my natural daily cycle is significantly longer than 24 hours maybe wasn't so crazy after all.

As an adult I did discover that I can take melatonin and actually fall asleep like a normal person instead of lying awake in bed for two hours every night before I could fall asleep. Though it's questionable whether being dependent on melatonin long term is a good thing. But even so, I still struggle with feeling absolutely exhausted when I wake up in the morning. I feel tired all day long to the point of occasionally dozing off in my office chair, but then as soon as it gets dark outside I start to feel awake for the first time all day. I wish that all these morning people who get up every morning at 4:30 and think that I'm just being lazy could feel just once the way that I feel when I wake up in the morning. Almost every morning when I wake up, I feel completely and utterly exhausted and my first thought is, "I wish I could die so that I could sleep forever." I wish morning people who look down on me could feel what I feel just once, because I'm sure it would give them a new perspective.

Yes, motivation can help. I am able to get up early when I really need to when I'm working on site at a customer or when I'm doing something for a hobby I enjoy (e.g. getting up early for a race because every race starts early in the morning). So at first glance that might seem to support the theory that anyone can be a morning person if they just have the motivation, so really I must just lack motivation. The thing is though, that if I have to work at a customer site for a week, the first day it's easy for me to get up on time. The second day is harder. The third day is torture. The fourth day I'm just a red bull guzzling zombie. So yeah, motivation can get me out of bed early for a day or two, but it's not sustainable.

glaukos wrote:

I had a theory that if only the daily cycle was like 28 hours long instead of 24, then I would be much better off. I always wanted to be awake longer when I was awake, and then once I was asleep I wanted to sleep longer. I had many such ideas as a kid, but adults always thought I was crazy. Then just recently I saw that someone did a scientific study where they isolated people from any clues about time of day (e.g. light, temperature) and observed their sleep cycle. They determined that the average person's natural cycle is actually a little longer than 24 hours. And that's the average person. I'm definitely not in the middle of the bell curve on this particular metric. So my idea that my natural daily cycle is significantly longer than 24 hours maybe wasn't so crazy after all.

I, too, have seen studies showing that the average person has a natural cycle that is somewhat longer than 24 hours. I'm one of the outliers--I really wish the day were 23 hours long. That would work so much better for me.

I wonder what night owls did 20,000 years ago? Did they guard the camp site and keep the fire going? Form raiding bands and plunder the morning people at 2 AM? Smoke peyote and paint animals on cave walls in a shamanistic trance?

Rupp fan wrote:

I wonder what night owls did 20,000 years ago? Did they guard the camp site and keep the fire going? Form raiding bands and plunder the morning people at 2 AM? Smoke peyote and paint animals on cave walls in a shamanistic trance?

In hunting & gathering societies, night owls were necessary for the collective survival. You needed at least one adult to be awake when every one else was sleeping. (To wake up everyone in case something dangerous is coming.) That's why some of us evolved to be night owls. The introduction of agriculture changed this, and all modern societies are made by and for morning people.

Go to bed early enough to get a proper night's sleep before your target wake up time. Allow some time for falling asleep plus at least 7 hours. Be consistent about the time you go to bed. No TV, phone, laptops, tablets in the bedroom. Ensure that the room is properly dark, good curtains and blackout blinds, no light sources at all. Reduce or cut out caffeine and alcohol. Don't eat within 3 hours of going to bed.

Simple :)

I try to my best to getting up early but failed.

pr100 wrote:

Go to bed early enough to get a proper night's sleep before your target wake up time. Allow some time for falling asleep plus at least 7 hours. Be consistent about the time you go to bed. No TV, phone, laptops, tablets in the bedroom. Ensure that the room is properly dark, good curtains and blackout blinds, no light sources at all. Reduce or cut out caffeine and alcohol. Don't eat within 3 hours of going to bed.

Simple :)

This actually is fairly simple, but the whole not eating within x hours of bed would be hard to pull off....and is it really all that necessary? I know people say that you shouldn't eat before bed for weight loss reasons, but if that's not a concern then what's the problem? I'm not talking about an entire meal, but a light snack 30-60 minutes before bed doesn't seem like an issue.

When I worked 12-16 hrs a day I had to workout before work or it wasn’t going to happen. I work far less hours now but the routine stuck. As others have mentioned -sleep hygiene - consistent bed time, dark room, no phone or tv for a while before bed, etc. also, what made the biggest difference for me as I transitioned to early morning workouts and even now is simply planning. If I lay out my running clothes, my work clothes, prep the coffee maker, etc I’m 100% successful in getting up at 4am. When I fail to do those things I feel to rushed and stressed and I’m probably 50% at best on those days due to having to find clothes in the dark, hoping my watch and headphones are charged, do I have coffee etc. Prepping makes a huge difference.