A search online for “how to become a morning person” provides a daunting amount of content. Books have been written on the subject, of course. There are articles for pages and pages, suggesting everything from working out first thing (yeah right), to supplements, to endless gadgets, “smart alarms” and probable quackery. There’s an entire industry dedicated to our neoliberal obsession with injecting productivity into every living second we have on this planet. An industry probably perpetuated by morning people, who get up a 5am every day and have meetings about new ways to profit off of spreading the word of Morning-ism.
As someone who aspires not to loathe mornings, I’m their exact target demographic. But the only thing that’s ever worked for me, when it comes to getting up, is pure willpower. Then again, that hasn’t made me a morning person exactly, just someone who (when pushed) gets up in the morning.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m addicted to sleep. I crave it constantly, even when I’m getting more than enough of it. My relationship with it has a negative impact on me and – in some instances – others (being late because I overslept, and so on).
Mornings aren’t for people like me. They’re for skinny women who run 5Ks while hooked up to a New York Times podcast through Bluetooth headphones. They love mornings, and mornings love them. Their relationship is symbiotic; awarding the women more time in the day to shine, while maintaining the morning’s reputation for breeding champions. I’m more of your “3am playing Candy Crush while eating pickles straight out of the jar, waiting for the sweet embrace of sleep to take me through to midday” kind of person. Even at the age of 31.
For a chunk of my life, my premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) has rendered me a sleepy depressive, always waiting for my next hit of oblivion. The sound of my alarm is often a prod to RSVP “attending” to a day I’d rather skip. We’re constantly told that successful people get up early. And that the earlier they get up, the more successful they are. I can sneer and put this down to the pervasive culture of “work ethic above literally everything else”, or I can accept that we live in a world built for morning people. And that, if I want to achieve my goals and be my “best self”, I need to become one.
Luckily for me, I have a mentor. I live with a morning person, and even share a bed with her. My girlfriend is a morning person’s morning person. I often wake up to the sound of her pottering about (an action that can only be performed before 12pm) in the kitchen, listening to Radio 4. Endlessly supportive, she brings me coffee, the smell of which is the gentlest nudge into the land of the awake. Lately, she’s been making sure I get up at 10am – a leisurely time (practically the afternoon) for anyone with a nine to five job. But, if I was allowed to, I could easily sleep all day. Often, there’s simply no time at which I feel awake and refreshed. The concept of wanting to leave my bed is genuinely quite hard for me to grasp.
My relationship with mornings has always been dysfunctional. For much of my late teens and early 20s, I’d only see them on the way home from a night out. I remember one particularly beautiful one, sat on a lion in an empty Trafalgar Square. When the sky changes colour, it does it in a stealthy way that makes you wonder, “how did it do that?” One moment it was a deep navy blue, the next it was a pale blueish grey. The cool, damp air felt refreshing against my face, and my ears were still ringing from blaring music. A drunk man appeared, and asked if I wanted to go home with him. I told him I didn’t speak English, and made my own way home to a bed which I collapsed on to, letting sleep wash through me and saturate my bones.
Mornings became something scary and unfamiliar; something altogether quite extreme. Of course, there have been times I’ve been forced to reckon with them. I’ve been a freelancer for most of my adult life, but this sometimes involves going into offices – the most morning-y places on earth. In these situations, every morning would feel like an assault. My alarm would go off, and I’d feel sick with panic, “five more minutes”-ing myself until the fear of being late outweighed my fear of engaging with the day.
It’s likely that I’ll never love mornings, and mornings will never love me. I’ll always see them as painful, and they’ll always see me as unappreciative of their splendour. I just hope that we can learn to be civil to one another. Because, ultimately, sleeping the day away isn’t a nice feeling. I mean – don’t get me wrong – it feels incredible while you’re doing it. But waking up when the type As have had two meals, been for a run, and sent 90 emails is – if nothing else – humbling.
Eleanor Margolis is a columnist for the i newspaper and Diva
