The Joyful Discipline Of Waking Up Early
Here's why waking up when its still dark out can be fun
My alarm goes off at 5:00am every weekday morning.
A gentle vibration on my Apple Watch lets me know it’s time to get up and get moving. I bought this watch specifically so I could wake up without any unnecessary noise. I don’t want to bother my wife with whatever blaring bells an iPhone defaults to as an alarm.
Once I’m awake, I quietly slide out of bed, gently close the bedroom door, tiptoe into the living room, and meditate on the couch for ten minutes. It feels kind of silly to sit down and close my eyes after just getting out of bed a few moments ago, but it helps clear the cobwebs that have built up in my brain overnight. It’s like a janitorial crew coming to clean up the office before all the employees arrive.
Once those ten minutes pass, I make a cup of black coffee (I’ve been doing intermittent fasting this year), sit down at the kitchen table, open my laptop, and start the day’s work.
Waking up early was never something that came naturally to me. There are times in my life when I’ve had to do it, like offseason football workouts in college, or that one brutal postgrad year when I worked at Enterprise Rent-A-Car. With each of these experiences, I had to white-knuckle it the whole way through. I was always able to get out of bed and make it in on time, but if I had my choice, I would have rolled over and gone right back to sleep. These days, however, I don’t have to force myself to get out of bed early. I want to do it and I like doing it. How did this happen? How did I make the transition from an average guy that hates his alarm to someone who relishes being a (very early) morning person?
The answer is, it started as a necessity. But gradually, over time, it became a source of pleasure.
When I was actively pursuing a career in stand-up comedy, time was my biggest enemy. There was so much I had to fit into any given day. I had to write, crafting new jokes and editing old ones to make them better. I had to perform, getting up at open mics and whatever shows I was booked on that night. I had to network and socialize, trying to make friends and connections that would help my career. And the biggest time suck of all, I had to work. From 9:00-5:30 every weekday, I had to sit at my desk and send emails for a paycheck. There was also the hidden cost of commuting to and from work, as the train ride from my apartment in Astoria, Queens to my office in Union Square took anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour every day. Before long, I was feeling extremely pressed for time, all the time, and it was stressing me out.
I knew I could get more out of each day if I woke up earlier. I just wasn’t able to do it consistently. I needed something that was going to help make it a habit. Enter the Rock Clock.
The Rock Clock was an app created by actor and professional wrestler Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. It was an alarm clock that, once you woke up, would deliver a motivational speech from The Rock about working hard and chasing your dreams. As a geriatric Millennial who was obsessed with the WWF in his early teen years (It’ll always be WWF to me. WWE just doesn’t sound right) and who followed along as The Rock transitioned from wrestler to action movie star/self-help guru, this felt like the perfect tool to get me up and going in the morning. So I downloaded the app and set a small initial goal to start. I would wake up five minutes earlier than normal and spend that extra time meditating. We would see where it went from there.
So my alarm would go off, The Rock would tell me to get out there and work hard, I would go sit on the couch for five minutes and breathe with my eyes closed, and that was it. It doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, but it turned out to be the small, crucial step that set me on a path towards an engrained habit. Before long, I no longer had to force myself to get out of bed. My mind began to crave the psychological rewards of waking up early and being active. I was addicted to starting the day on a high note. And like any addict, I began to need a higher and higher dose to satisfy my craving. So that five minutes of meditation turned into ten, at which point I added on ten minutes of writing, which soon became another ten minutes of push-ups and sit-ups before getting in the shower. Before long, I was awake an hour earlier than usual, taking care of various tasks that helped me improve myself. I didn’t even need the Rock Clock anymore.
Eventually, I hit a limit to how early I could wake up. When you’re out doing comedy and don’t get home until 11:00pm or midnight, it’s probably not a good idea to wake up earlier than 6:00/6:30am if you want to remain a functional person for the rest of the day. By the end of the workweek I was exhausted, but I’d always manage to recharge over the weekend and get my energy back. It was a challenging process, but the habit was set. This was more or less how things continued for me over the next eight-ish years until I gave up on stand-up in 2023.
When I was done with comedy, I wondered what I was going to do with my mornings. I knew waking up early was valuable in and of itself, not only when it’s tied to a larger goal. It feels good to start the day off with a win by overcoming a challenge. Plus, you can carry that momentum into the rest of your day. Even though I wasn’t pursuing comedy anymore, I didn’t want to let go of those positive vibes.
Once I decided to start this Substack, the plan became pretty clear. I would wake up at 5:00am and take a couple hours to myself to write and read before getting ready for work.
The 5:00am start time feels a little arbitrary, but I had a specific mimetic model I was working off of. I had seen a documentary about Toni Morrison and learned that she would wake up at 5:00am each day to work on her debut novel, The Bluest Eye. At the time, she was raising two young boys as a working single mother, so this early wake-up call was a necessity. It was the only part of the day that she could get to herself.
Eventually she became successful enough to drop the day job and become a full-time writer, but she kept the 5:00am start time. When asked why, she said “That part of the day is incredible. I’m very, very smart, early in the day. Later on I…ugh. But early? Very good, very sensitive.” There’s definitely something to this. There’s a sense of calm and clarity that comes early in the morning. The rest of the world isn’t moving yet, and you can hear a lot of important things in the resulting silence if you listen closely.
Needless to say, her words resonated with me, and I wanted to follow them as closely as I could. So 5:00am became my waking hour as well. It’s definitely extremely early, but now that I’m no longer doing comedy and can be in bed at a reasonable hour, 5:00am isn’t that much of a challenge. I still get between 7-8 hours of sleep every night.
Some people might wonder if waking up this early negatively affects my energy levels during my work day. It doesn’t. In fact, it does the opposite. I feel like I have more energy at work when I wake up early to write. When I don’t follow my routine, I feel sluggish and agitated, like somebody is standing over my shoulder and nagging me about something I forgot to do.
While difficult at first, this new morning routine became much easier over time. Because it feels good to wake up early and get stuff done, and that positive feeling continues throughout the day, waking up early becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop that is carried forward by its own momentum. The difficulty that comes with getting out of bed is eventually no match for the positivity that is generated once I’m up and at it. You just have to stack a few days in a row, and the rest takes care of itself.
I should clarify, waking up early isn’t just a matter of having the willpower to start moving once the alarm goes off. The real secret to waking up early is that the process begins the night before. If I want to wake up early, I’m extremely mindful of how I spend my evenings. I don’t drink during the week, or stay up late, as both would be impediments to waking up when I need to. I also set up my workstation on the kitchen table before I go to bed. I put my laptop out with two coasters next to it, one for my coffee and one for my giant Stanley water bottle. It’s like laying out the clothes you’re going to wear to the gym the night before. Whatever you can do to remove friction now will make a difficult thing easier down the line.
The preparatory part of the process, everything you have to do and avoid the night before, also becomes easier as you get older. Now that I’m a boring, married guy nearing middle age, I don’t have many distractions or vices at night anymore. I come home from work, eat dinner, do the dishes, spend time with my wife and dog, and then I’m usually in bed by 9pm. That routine wouldn’t have been possible (or even satisfying) for me in my 20s, regardless of whether or not I was pursuing comedy. But now, at 37, it’s all I need to feel content and relaxed at the end of the day.
Enough about specifics though. I want to close with what I’ve found to be my overall philosophical motivation for maintaining this kind of lifestyle. It’s the larger “Why” behind the whole thing.
Simply put, I enjoy the discipline that’s required by this process. I believe there are certain ways you can limit yourself in the present that unlock more possibilities, opportunities and abilities down the line, especially when it comes to creating art. I’m going to write more about this at length in the future, but I don’t think discipline is held up enough as an artistic virtue. We valorize the vices and pathologies of artists, acting like that’s what helped them create their masterpieces. But what masterpieces have we lost because an artist lacked the discipline to help themselves, or to ask for help? How many artists have fallen victim to their vices, their supposed sources of inspiration, depriving the world of their future work? What else could Truman Capote have written after In Cold Blood if he had been able to get ahold of his drinking? Think of the music Kurt Cobain could have made if he permitted himself to grow into middle age. Maybe Elvis could have had a critically acclaimed, late-in-life, Johnny Cash-esque revival if he just laid off the fried peanut butter sandwiches and amphetamine.
There’s certainly a debate to be had here. Does a lack of inhibition open up a pathway for art to be expressed? If so, do you have to throw inhibition out the window in all aspects of your life in order to attain the spiritual freedom required to make great art? Or can you utilize discipline, intent, and craft to create great art and live a bountiful, healthy life at the same time? I don’t know if it’s possible, but I’m choosing to believe that it is. I’m much more interested in art borne out of discipline than art borne out of excess. It’s what I want for myself. It seems like an overall better way to live. And if that’s the path you want to walk, you need to find examples like Toni Morrison and cling to them for dear life, because there are way more examples that could tempt you in the other direction. That’s why I wake up at 5:00am and attempt to write something meaningful every morning.
There’s a Marcus Aurelius quote that’s been endlessly shared by Extremely Online Stoics (Any oxymoron if there ever was one). Normally when something like this is ubiquitous online it becomes extremely cringe and annoying (Think Teddy Roosevelt’s “The Man In The Arena” speech). But as I’ve gotten older I’ve found the things that are the most cringe tend to be the most true. The quote reads:
“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”
I don’t know if any of us are “created” or “born” to do anything specific, that’s an entirely different conversation. But I do know that life is hard and incredibly trying, even for the most privileged and blessed among us. It’s often boring, frequently exhausting, and occasionally cruel. I also know that we all have things we enjoy doing, things that are difficult to do, but they make us feel good and are spiritually beneficial at the same time. The fact that they are difficult is probably what makes them beneficial in the first place. Whatever these things are for you personally, you need to incorporate them into your life if you want to do more than just survive the drudgery of the day-to-day. You have to identify them and find a way to get them done, even if it means waking up before the sun to make it happen.
