The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
~Rumi
As a teenager, I could not wake up for school. Maybe because I was a night owl. My mom would come in over and over and tell me to get up. She would then threaten the dreaded “water treatment.” Still sawing logs, she would come in with a cup of water, dip her fingers in and sprinkle water over my head until I got up. She was probably too gentle and this wasted too much of her time in the morning. She should have just walked in first thing and dumped a glass of water on me. The point is, as you will see below. I am not by nature a morning person, but I have trained myself to find freedom, productivity and success in part by waking up early and ensuring enough sleep.
In a recent article titled Excellence is a Habit, we discussed the path to living the life of your dreams is paved by adopting a set of easy to implement habits and tracking them. I introduced the HabiTracker, which you can download for free here.
My daily habits that I have tracked for about 5 years now, starts with:
Sleep by 10pm
Wake by 5am
Then I go into other productive habits for work, personal, spiritual and physical well-being.
The reason it starts with sleep is that in order to write, meditate and journal, I have to get up before everyone else to create time that was not available before. I had to create that time. I don’t track it, but in order to get to sleep by 10 and make sure I can wake up at 5, I have to stay on task the night before with getting dinner ready, helping with homework, 5 kids’ bedtimes, evening journaling and shutting the house down. So really the preparation for getting to sleep by 10pm starts at 5 or 6pm. If I don’t get to sleep by 10, then it is really hard to wake up at 5. I have set the target for at least 7 hours. Some say we need 7 or 8 hours of sleep. I am not a sleep expert but, as we will see later, if we deprive ourselves of sleep, we can cause serious impacts to our health.
I am not a morning person! Or at least I wasn’t until I trained myself to be.
Let’s be clear, I know you are looking at this and saying 5am sucks, I just don’t get up that early or I stay up too late to get up at 5. I hear you and I am, or was, the exact same way. I was always a night owl, from the time I was a kid. Since I was 12 or 13, I was always up later than the rest of my house including older teenage siblings. And by late, I mean staying up until 2 or 3am on the regular. And by the time I was in college, law school and then practicing law or running my business in my 30s, all-nighters were not often but not uncommon either.
I have seen my fair share of sunrises, not because I woke up early, but because I was still awake from the day before. But leaving out the extremes, I would say that I would usually get to sleep by 11:30pm-12:30am. I just couldn’t shut down. That also meant that I couldn’t wake up until after 7, then have to sprint to get kids out the door, get myself ready and get to work. It was all a mad dash, leading to tons of anxiety for myself and my family. I was tired and not in great health. I would drink two big 20 oz Yetis of coffee to get me through the morning. Now, I don’t drink any caffeine and have tons more energy and am wide awake.
As soon as I woke up, I looked at the phone and didn’t look in the mirror and say I love you. See previous article title Light in the Mirror. Rather, I looked at the phone and immediately started responding to the emails and texts that had come in like my thumbs were on fire. I thought I was being super proactive. I started my day late for everything. Even before having kids, I was starting my day from behind because I was up too late. There are a lot of reasons why I was in this unnatural state that many of us have been trained to live in. The point here is that my sleep cycle was not right. I couldn’t start my day with intention because I was starting my day from behind, from a position of weakness.
In October 2018, I was at a Greater Philadelphia Hotel Association luncheon. I believe it was an awards ceremony for regional leaders in the hospitality industry. I have no idea why I was there other than my friend Jake Dawson from the Chamber of Commerce had invited me and it was a free lunch where I could meet some folks. It was a few months after the Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl and everyone was still pumped. The keynote speaker was Merrill Reese, the official radio announcer known as “the voice of the Eagles.” There was a lot of great energy filling the big hotel ballroom. Reese was funny and engaging talking about the victory and some of the players and his unmistakable voice was so familiar to all those in the room.
At the luncheon, I sat next to a nice guy in a dark suit in his late 30s or early 40s. We got to talking and somehow we started talking about having little kids and the challenge of making time to workout. He told me that he gets up at 4:30am to make the time to work out. It sounded crazy to me, but I knew he was right. There was no other time in the day for me to make this a routine. This could have been one of those casual conversations that is easily forgotten, but it stuck with me.
My wife and I had joined a great family gym a couple of years earlier that had fun stuff for the kids while we worked out. We got there regularly at times, but it was not a part of our daily routine. That was it, knowing this guy was right, I started setting my alarm for 4:30am and heading to the gym. I brought my change of clothes and went to work from the gym.
In order to get up at 4:30, I had to start getting to sleep by 9:30. This was not easy. My whole teen and adult life, I had been a late night owl, not an early bird gettin’ the worm. I was not a morning person at all. When I would come home from college, I would stay out ’til the wee hours of the morning with friends and then sleep all day. My Mom used to say that I was training to be a member of the Olympic Sleeping Team.
As I got older, hanging with friends turned into working late or cleaning the house or some project that I convinced myself had to be done until past midnight. I did a lot of volunteer work and served on a number of non-profit boards, so late night was the time I could get that work done. Yes, I was helping the mission for worthwhile organizations, but not operating at my best. I was very “busy,” although I was really just distracting myself from doing what I should have been doing, caring for myself, my health and my wellbeing. But we can awake with intention and break lifelong bad habits with firm determination and deliberate practice.
The point is, get good sleep. There is a ton of research about the benefits of consistent good sleep of at least 7–8 hours for adults. Shut down earlier and get to sleep! Your brain, body and future self will thank you.
Visit benparvey.com to download our Habitually Inspired HabiTracker.
P.S. Be sure you add meditation to your daily habits for 2025.
