Why I Wake At 5

It is 05:30.

My eyes are still a little blurry but the coffee is helping.

The house is quiet, I am the only one awake in a family of four. I have been awake for 30 minutes and am now sat in my comfortable chair in the corner of our family room drinking pour-over with a 25 minute timer going as I rough out my first rough draft of this post.

Contrast this with yesterday.

Not feeling great I decided to allow myself a lie-in. After stomping on my alarm I sleep until 07:30 and come downstairs into the heat of a morning discussion about screentime. Words and energy thunder through the room and I am immediately sucked into it. In that moment I am snapped out of a warm alpha-wave-ish state and into high-consciousness. I am suddenly, alarmingly, very present.

Scrobble forwards an hour and a half. It is about nine and I am only just sitting down to collect my thoughts and begin my working day. My attention is scattered, my battery already a little depleted, my ability to connect with my own thoughts and practice is already challenged.

Having spent a great deal of energy this morning, I now need to dig deeper into my energy reserves to get myself back on track.

Back to today.

I have spent 30 minutes in a routine that I know well.
The routine has asked nothing of me, instead it has been grounding - allowing that post-sleep state to continue.
In this time I have not said a single word, my mind is still processing and working on a level that is not constrained by language.
I am able to follow the threads of my thoughts, at their pace, and then bring them into this moment.
I have been able to put my energy where it wanted to be put.

So What?

Waking at five and building a routine around such an early start continues to be one of the greatest productivity changes I have made in recent years. If I have a proposal, a report, a book, a post, or an intractible problem that needs fixing - this is the time where it is most likely to get done.

The inertia created by life's whirlwind can be difficult to overcome, and overcoming it rarely happens without intentional action. My reality is one in which my attention is often blurred by 09:00 - but this is as true if I wake at 05:00 and get key work done in my most productive time of the day, as it is if I wake at 08:55.

Over the past few years I have worked from 06:30/7am starts back to five. Right now 5am is a good balance between being social in the evening, and good quality output in the mornings. Flicking back through my diary over the past few years it has been a recurring theme: the power of the early morning quiet and space, so different from the rest of my day.

In truth I am not advocating waking at five - if nothing else it would be ridiculous to assume that one technique should be universally useful. I imagine that very different timings could have worked well for me prior to having children.

Building this routine has also been a great basis for habit-stacking. Taking existing rhythms and adding to them, building out chains of habits that are allowing me to reach my slow-burn goals as well as my immediate ones.

So if I am not specifically recommending waking at five, what are the general principles or guidelines that underpin them:

• Build strong, useful routines - chains of habits that orientate you and reduce friction at key times of the day
• Allow space for alpha-wave states - pre-language thought - that allows you to connect with yourself and your goals

Further Reading

Building strong routines is explored very successfully by James Clear in his book Atomic Habits. It's a shortish read but well worth it.

Jim Kwik gives a good introduction to Alpha Wave states in this video on brainwaves, distraction and performance. The video includes some pleasing details about Enstein and Dali's daily practices, designed to make the most of the Alpha Wave state.

I am not in a position to sit holding a rock just yet but I find the practice of an hour in the morning without speaking to be an approximation (at least experientially). This is definitely an area that I will be looking into further.

There was also a warm and insightful article about early morning working in the WSJ recently.

Image courtesy of @alicekat via Unsplash.