Why an Early Start Is the ‘Quintessence of Life’
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According to a 2023 YouGov poll, each year, about a third of American adults—and more than half of 18-to-29-year-olds—start the new year with at least one resolution. One of the most common resolutions, at 22 percent of all adults, is “being happy.” Another common one is “improving physical health.” I endorse the sentiment behind these commitments, of course—if I didn’t, I wouldn’t write the “How to Build a Life” column.
But these good intentions are too broad to be successful. Behavioral scientists have long shown that specific goals are the ones that tend to lead to real wins. They have found, for example, that setting a small resolution for a day’s work motivates teams, and can do the same even if someone is working alone. When I am writing a book (which I am about 75 percent of my professional time), my goal on any given day is simply to compose 100 words—a very modest but achievable target, and one that eventually adds up to finished chapters and, ultimately, a completed book. By the same token, researchers find that incremental progress is a great way to address complex policy problems.
And so it is when building your life. This year, try setting a very defined goal that you can realistically achieve—and that sets you on a path toward those bigger, more diffuse resolutions. And I have one particular, very achievable commitment in mind that will help you become happier and improve your health and effectiveness: This year, start getting up early.
[From the October 1904 issue: The fetich of early rising]
How early is early? you ask. Although the clock time will vary according to time of year and where you live, what I have in mind is before daybreak.
To rise before dawn sounds ascetic—indeed, the habit is characteristic of many monastic traditions throughout history. Certainly from the fourth century, and possibly earlier, Christian monks have observed the part of the liturgy called Matins, which is conducted between 3 a.m. and dawn. In the Hindu religion, too, adherents are encouraged to experience the brāhma muhūrta, which in Sanskrit means “the creator’s time” and refers to the moment that occurs precisely one hour and 36 minutes before sunrise. To discipline the body and mind, and frame the day in worship of the divine, the thinking goes, this is the appropriate time to get up.
Modern neuroscience indicates that, as painful as the practice can seem for people unaccustomed to it, this may be the right way to start the day for optimal human performance. For example, a 2012 study of adolescents and young adults ages 16 to 22 in India compared two randomly selected groups, one of which rose before 4:30 a.m. and the other at about 7 a.m. The researchers found that the early risers significantly improved during the study in both attention and recall tasks, outperforming the later risers. Consistent with this finding, a 2019 paper in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience showed that our brain exhibits greater functional connectivity in the mornings. This, we might assume, facilitates better performance of complex tasks.
Rising early is an especially effective resolution because it tends to enable the achievement of other popular goals. For example, new evidence from researchers suggests that rising early makes it easier to build good habits, because the goal-directed brain regions—such as the hippocampus and orbitofrontal cortex—work better at this time than later in the day.
One habit that is easier to adopt first thing in the morning is exercise. Clear data exist to show that when people intend to exercise early in the day, they are significantly less likely to experience “intention failure” than if they plan to exercise later.
Of course, getting up before dawn is difficult. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t need a resolution. For almost everyone, the body resists getting out of the warm bed, and moving abruptly from sleep to wakefulness can feel like violent disruption. Mother Nature, you might feel, simply doesn’t want you to get up—and that could be right in an evolutionary sense: We are programmed to seek comfort and get rest when we can. Your Pleistocene ancestors—who probably didn’t live much past the age of 30—needed to husband their energy to fight for their survival every day. This instinct still exists, even though we are no longer fighting to survive.
Because getting up early is a challenge, you might assume that one cost of doing so would be feeling less happy. The research says the opposite. Psychologists writing in the journal Emotion have shown that people who get up early enjoy a more positive mood throughout the day compared with those who rise late. Even after controlling for problems such as depression and neuroticism that are associated with sleep disorders, people who stay up late and get up late tend to have worse habits of emotional regulation than those who get up early; that, in turn, can lead to higher levels of negative mood.
[Read: America’s worst time zone]
So the science on the benefits of rising early—in spite of the difficulty—seems clear. But what do you need to do to succeed in your resolution and develop this habit? Here are a few things to keep in mind:
1. This morning started last night.
Early rising is really the second part of two habits: The first part is going to bed early enough that you get sufficient sleep. This probably seems like the easier habit to keep, but for many people it isn’t. I have written before about why people don’t make it to bed or can’t get to sleep at a reasonable time. For many young adults, the problem is what psychologists call “revenge bedtime procrastination,” in which they stay up late as a form of rebellion against their own inner authority. Knowing that you have this tendency can help you break free of it.
Others might have a genetic disposition to want to stay up late and get up late. Or (like me) they simply find it hard to turn off their mental machine, which can make falling asleep tough. For this issue, science-based protocols can make a dramatic difference.
2. Raise the cost of not getting up.
One reason people struggle to rise early is because they aren’t required to do so. In my 20s, when I made a living as a musician, I always got up well after the sun rose, because I never had rehearsals or concerts in the morning. In theory, I wanted to get up early. But if I set the clock for 6 a.m., and then, when it went off, I knew there was no cost to going back to sleep, I would turn off the alarm and roll over. Later, in my 30s, when I finally went to college and graduate school, I had places to be very early—and that changed my habits.
Even if you don’t have to start your work or studies early, you can still induce yourself to get up by making a conscious commitment to accomplish something of value. In Meditations, which were Marcus Aurelius’s notes to himself, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher wrote: “In the morning when thou findest thyself unwilling to rise, consider with thyself presently, it is to go about a man’s work that I am stirred up.” So choose a deed that will stir you up.
In psychological experiments, participants who commit even to a trivial task such as solving a minor math problem right after their alarm sounds are far less likely than others to go back to sleep. If necessary, you can increase the cost of sleeping in by making yourself accountable to someone else. For example, if you get a workout partner and agree to meet at the gym first thing, you are much more likely to roll out of bed when the clock goes off—rather than incur the cost of letting your buddy down.
3. Make early rising divine.
As mentioned above, many religious traditions dedicate the time before dawn to prayer and worship, in the belief that these moments of tranquility and mental clarity are best spent in the presence of the divine. But a nonbeliever can equally well experience these hours as transcendent. Don’t take my word for it—here is confirmation from a notorious atheist, the 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “Do not shorten the morning by getting up late … look upon it as the quintessence of life … Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth.”
Make your predawn the most transcendent moment in your day by framing it in existential terms: The discomfort of rising early bears witness to your being truly alive, and it is the day’s first act of your rebellion against death. Spend that precious time without devices, with your attention undivided by quotidian demands and trivial distractions, so that you can explore deep thoughts about the big questions of life.
[Derek Thompson: Can medieval sleeping habits fix America’s insomnia?]
So much for the soul; let’s end on a practical note. To make getting up before dawn your ordinary routine, you need to establish the practice as a habit. As a neuroscientific matter, this is a behavior governed by the basal ganglia in the cerebrum. That means it must be repeated enough to become automatic, not a conscious daily choice. How long will this take to establish? British scholars studying habit formation have found that this varies widely from individual to individual: to achieve 95 percent automaticity, anything from 18 to 254 days.
For the morning larks among us, this means a predawn routine will start to become a true part of your life by the end of January; for the night owls, it could take until sometime in September. I was definitely the latter, and many mornings, it felt pretty bad to leave my warm bed when it was still dark. But it was worth it: The brāhma muhūrta is now the best time of my day.