(Part of a story about how I became a morning person.)
selflathing
this was a nice thinking prompt! i’ve wanted to be a person who gets up early for a long time: every time i get back from Europe and naturally wake 5-6am for a week it is GLORIOUS. but i never seem to sustain it - i stay up late, drift forward. why?
https://t.co/NLi0Uzmq2j
first: i would rather mindlessly be online than go to bed early. it feels childish, petulant, something to prove. one reason might be that my mother enforced an 8pm bedtime well into my late teens, i think because she wanted HER own down time.
i resented this so much. a couple of times i got caught reading after bedtime a couple of times and was punished for it. (every now and then i remember these little parenting moments and am flabbergasted :/ )
2nd: and on the flipside, she was a light and late sleeper. weekends in particular were her time to sleep in (if i disturbed by e.g. closing a door with ANY noticeable noise, ire would result. i would make a great cat burglar now). i think i default inherited that view
3rd: i feel there’s more time for me at the end of the day. if i want more unwind, no problem. my fear of shifting my free time more in favour of mornings is that at some point i ought to start doing work. knowing there’s limited time puts a clock in my head that i keep checking
except this is not true: my body is quite good at getting a consistent amount of sleep, so if i stay up late, i crash tired into the morning.
i’ve oscillated between “sleep as late as possible and crash straight into work” and “aim to get up earlier to enjoy the morning but struggle, feel bad about myself, and give up” for YEARS now
but things might be changing. last night i noticed i was just bumming around the internet aimlessly. checked in with myself and there wasn’t much in particular i wanted to do.
didn’t manage to convert that into bedtime but i’m incorporating yoga + nidra into my wind-down routine lately, so there’s potential for “i seem to have run out of things to do, time to transition to bedtime self-love”
another thing i can try: what if weekends were for getting up EARLY and enjoying the morning? no looming deadline of needing to start work. rise, be excited for a morning walk with a cup of something.
i know so little about what the world is like early, and when i think about it like that, i’m excited to be there to watch it wake up :)
so yeah. there’s wiggle room to be found, if i ask kindly and work with the answers. this has been a nice exercise :) 🙏