From a Night Owl to an Early Bird has Adjustable Trade-Offs
If one thing your job allows you to do, that would be the mastery of your schedule and the ability to go to bed at a reasonable hour.
Those people working night shifts have a different routine; they might not even relate here, because the circadian rhythm is best followed by a person who wakes up with the Sun and sleeps early too.
Adjusting sleep while working full-time
Despite my busy work hours, when one day I woke up early, I felt happy, it was like I had so much time to do the pending tasks from the previous day.
I can be ahead of the meeting discussions today. I can reach office on time without someone leaving a note on my desk about me missing the stand-up. I can have breakfast on time and head-start my first working hours of the day effectively.
On top of all this, I can finish my work early and leave early too. It happened for some days. I had a few good quality sleeps back when my job started, and I was still trying to fit the morning routine properly.
Normalising from college routine was tough.
College life shifted the entire sleeping schedule to the night-owl type. We even bragged that it is so awesome to be awake at night when no one is. What were we? Vigilantes? No, the word is “lazy”.
We were too lazy to skip social hangouts, online gaming and bring it on, OTT services like Netflix and whatnot.
We used to sleep at around 2 AM because our hostel canteens were open until then. That means till 2 AM the next day, we can quickly get food. Then waking hours changed depending on what we have to do after waking up. Isn’t it the reason every time?
Why would anyone wake up early if they don’t have a strong reason to do so? Your schedule doesn’t have to be morning tight. It just has to be rhythmic. And when it is morning, it is just easier to maintain because we face all the morning tasks with a fresh mind without any distraction from the previous day’s stress.
Morning person is the best lifestyle change you will ever make
But there is a reason why morning riser is the best change you can do to your lifestyle and why healthy people advocate that. It is because when you move with the Sun, your body tends to be closer to the natural circadian cycle, and you won’t feel daily chores like a drag. They will become second nature.
That is what I am living now. To be consistent with my morning routine, I used to set multiple reminders on my phone all day to make sure I am on time for everything.
As time passed, reminders decreased because I purged many of them as I adopted them as habits.
It took almost two months, and only the streak mentality helped me get there. I realised very late that streak routine is training your brain in the long run to follow a particular pattern and after that, it will go on auto-pilot.
The significant trade-off in being a morning riser
Though there were some trade-offs in becoming a morning person, the major one for me was social hangouts.
I am an extrovert person, always talking about something nonstop until someone shuns me. Now, you understand how hard it is for an extrovert to avoid social interactions. But I had to. I had to do it for my health.
I don’t have that many morning risers in friends circle who I can immediately see every day.
Who am I kidding? I have zero morning buddies, the result of a trade-off which starts the night before. If I am an early riser, then I have to go to bed early too. And that means missing some social hangouts with your friends whenever they plan a rendezvous at night.
It starts somewhere around 8 PM and lasts till God knows when, as almost everyone is hungover and we wake up the next day forgetting what time we shut our eyes.
Here I am at an advantage that I skipped the hang there and reached home around 10 PM because quality sleep matters to me and I cannot compromise that even for one Friday night every week.
Weekends mean nothing to me. For me, it is only day and night because I am a freelancer right now and working on your schedule means managing your day independent of what day it is (based on the kind of work demands).
But that doesn’t mean we are disconnected. We are still connected, but meetings are not that frequent. That’s it.
Whenever I hang out with them, especially college buds, I make it count. Because the frequency is very less, it is once in 2 or 3 months.
The benefits are personal.
Nowadays every adult wants some alone time to ponder about themselves. Or maybe you want just to stay alone for some time to think about career and relationships.
All while begin away from the noise of the city, and all the pollution.
Morning gives you that. There is no one to disturb you in the morning time with your schedule. And even if someone did wake up, they did it for their valid reasons and won’t block you ever. It makes morning the best time to work on yourself and start any new activity that you want to set in a routine.
Two activities have become an essential part of my lifestyle because of that: daily reading and exercise.
Writing also I do in the morning, but that is regarding my freelance work, so the schedule is not consistent.
Right now, I am trying to shift my blogging routine to the morning hours, and once I achieve that, I aspire to publish multiple blogs every day. It is the next experiment I am striving to make successful.
This article belongs to a series of articles I am publishing in this 21-day streak. See the first one here. This one is the eleventh one — 10 more to go.
To read the remaining ones, navigate to the end of the first article where there is a reference list sorted by day number.
~ Sanjeev
