Getting Up Early, Without the Sermon
I want to separate two things that usually arrive together. One is the claim that early rising makes you more productive, more disciplined, or better. The other is the observation that the early morning is quiet and that quiet is pleasant.
I have no interest in the first and I am fairly confident it is oversold. The second is just true, and it is the only reason I do this.
What did not work
Willpower. Obviously. Two or three days, then a bad night, then nothing for a fortnight. Everyone knows this and everyone tries it first anyway, myself included, repeatedly.
Moving the alarm gradually. The standard advice is fifteen minutes earlier each week. This did nothing for me except make me mildly tired at an unremarkable hour. The change was too small to produce any of the reward that would make it worth continuing, so there was never a reason to keep going.
Going to bed earlier as the first step. This is logically correct and practically useless, because lying in bed at half nine not sleeping is worse than being tired. The order has to be the other way round.
Daily. The single biggest error. Making it an everyday commitment meant every missed day was a broken streak, and broken streaks are how habits die. It also meant the mornings stopped being distinct from each other.
What did work
Once a week, with a specific destination. Not get up early, but go to the park before sunrise on Wednesday. A reason to be somewhere is much easier to act on than a time to stop being asleep.
Starting in autumn. As I have written elsewhere, the light does most of the work if you pick the season where sunrise falls at a reasonable hour.
Clothes out the night before. Trivial and genuinely decisive. The decision point is not the alarm, it is three minutes later when you are standing in a cold room deciding what to put on. Removing that decision removes most of the failures.
Accepting a low success rate. I aim for one morning a week and probably manage thirty a year. That is a hit rate of well under sixty percent and it is completely fine, because thirty good mornings is thirty more than none. Framing it as a target rather than a rule is what made it survivable.
The sleep question, briefly
I am not qualified to say anything useful about sleep and I am not going to try. What I will say is that during the period I described in another piece here, when I was up at five every day for six weeks, I was not doing something admirable. I was not sleeping, and going outside was a coping strategy for that, and it ended when the sleep came back.
If you are already short on sleep, none of this is for you, and there is nothing to be gained by taking an hour off the front of the night. That should be obvious and is often not, given how this subject usually gets written about.
What it is actually for
An hour that nobody else has any claim on. That is the whole of it.
Not to get more done. I do almost nothing useful in that hour, and the two or three times I have tried to use it for work it stopped functioning as anything I wanted. It works precisely because it is not for anything.
The measurable effect on the rest of the day is, as far as I can tell, nil. I am not more focused. I am often slightly tired by four. What I get is the hour itself, and the reason I keep going back is that it was good while it was happening, which turns out to be a sufficient reason for a thing to be worth doing.
The social cost
Rarely mentioned and worth naming. An early morning habit is mildly antisocial in a specific way: it pushes your bedtime forward, and most social life happens in the evening.
For a once a week version this is trivial. You pick a night when nothing is on. For a daily version it is not trivial at all, and I think a lot of the people who write enthusiastically about five in the morning are quietly making a substantial trade that they do not mention.
If you live with someone, there is a second cost. Getting up at five is not a private act in a shared flat, no matter how carefully you move around. Laying clothes out the night before helps with this as much as it helps with the cold. Getting dressed in another room helps more.
What I would keep if I could only keep one thing
The destination rule. Everything else on my list is a technique for making the morning easier to start. The destination rule is the only one that makes it worth starting.
An alarm at half five with nothing attached to it is a request to be tired for no reason, and the honest response to that request is to turn it off. An alarm at half five that means you will be standing on a bridge watching the light come up over the river in forty minutes is a completely different proposition, and I have almost never turned that one off.
Pick the place first. The hour follows from it. Doing it the other way round is why most attempts at this fail, including all of mine for about two years.
