Looking for an article about becoming a morning person

November 5, 2015 4:11 PM

I'm looking for an article that I read within the past four years and I think it was on MeFi. It was a first person account of the author and her boyfriend trying to become a morning person by following various professional advice, like go for a morning walk, go to bed earlier, etc. I'm pretty sure it's not a similar article in Fitness Magazine about someone doing it alone. Ring a bell?
posted by bq to MetaFilter-Related at 4:11 PM (13 comments total)

Was it this one from Slate? (It's from 2008, but otherwise fits the bill.)

Spoiler: she realizes she doesn't want to be a morning person, she just wants to need less sleep.
posted by asterix at 5:52 PM on November 5, 2015 [5 favorites]

Yes! Thank you!
posted by bq at 9:24 PM on November 5, 2015

I'm surprised that wasn't made into an FPP; it seems custom-written for a Metafilter discussion.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:48 AM on November 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm a bit surprised too. (I'm also surprised the author is worried about being too much of a night owl-- I had a little trouble waking up for a meeting at 10:30am today myself. The meeting, however, was in at 10:30 in a time zone eight hours west of me...)
posted by nat at 5:18 PM on November 7, 2015

It's never to late to make it a FPP.
posted by el io at 11:37 PM on November 7, 2015

If you make it a FPP, I can tell you all about how the quiet, peaceful hour between 6 and 7 am is the best time of the day.
posted by double block and bleed at 5:52 AM on November 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

This is weird. I had a dream last night that I read some clickbait article called "early birds are born, night owls are made" about how people with owlish tendencies are made to be that way by their lazy parents who don't get them up early enough for melatonin intake to be properly regulated.

I think I have a bit of a guilt about my toddler's "late" 9 am wake up time.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 7:03 AM on November 8, 2015

PhoB, that's pitch perfect for a "Whatever you are doing you're doing wrong" article for parents. Upworthyesque, even.

I think that becoming a parent is how, as a man, I really learned to appreciate (by which I mean loathe) how media shames and second guesses people for their life choices in order to foster anxiety and encourage consumption. My wife, by virtue of being a woman, was already well familiar with it.
posted by leotrotsky at 9:55 AM on November 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

If you make it a FPP, I can tell you all about how the quiet, peaceful hour between 6 and 7 am is the best time of the day.

And the rose-gold light as it slowly readies for its assault on your eyelids.
posted by sebastienbailard at 6:11 PM on November 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

This is weird. I had a dream last night that I read some clickbait article called "early birds are born, night owls are made" about how people with owlish tendencies are made to be that way by their lazy parents who don't get them up early enough for melatonin intake to be properly regulated.

You have extremely specific dreams.
posted by lollusc at 8:06 PM on November 8, 2015 [6 favorites]

6-7 am can be achingly lovely, when you're coming at it from the other side. (Not when you're near tears because you couldn't force yourself to give up consciousness; for a good reason, like it happening in week one of a brand new thing with someone great. Or after a night that sped by because somehow, your mood, energy, and ability lined up to let you express a small but specific intention in a way that makes you happy. Or if you're in your early 20s, and are in the exact right place for that moment, i.e. sat on a hill over the city, after you've digested the greasiest food you could find, after hours of dancing and galavanting and whatnot. Or if you're in a window seat on a plane, and everyone else is asleep, and you look out past the wing, and appreciate the expanse around you, that rose-gold light, how lucky you are, generally. Imo that is the limited set of times 6-7am isn't some kind of punishment.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 8:56 PM on November 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

If you make it a FPP, I can tell you all about how the quiet, peaceful hour between 6 and 7 am is the best time of the day.

I'm a hardcore night owl, but for me, 6-7 am is the worst time to be awake. When I used to regularly pull all nighters in college, 6 am or so was when I actually started to feel tired. Up until that point, staying up was a breeze. I guess maybe I'm part vampire. As soon as the sun starts to come out, I want to retreat from those evil, bright rays of light.

Now, 3 am to 5 am, that's where it's at. So peaceful, so quiet, such a great time to get some really good (non work related) writing done or spend several hours reading random stuff on the internet guilt free because after all, I'm not going to actually get anything productive done this late at night (unless there is a very tight deadline hanging over my head, but now that I'm not in school that comes up rarely).

Fittingly, I'm writing this at 3:20 am (EST).

Incidentally, I hate that having a 9-5 job means getting up at the worst possible hour (7 am or so). Ugh. It's actually so much easier for me to wake up at 3 or 4 am, even if I've only slept a couple hours as often happens when I have to catch a super early flight.

In a perfect world, I would sleep from 6 am to noon, give or take an hour on either end. Although that would also mean during the New England winters I would only get to see about three hours of daylight, so that might get old after awhile.
posted by litera scripta manet at 12:24 AM on November 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

Agree with all of that. I'll also add that I've always been really impatient with the notion that being a morning person is a sign of strong moral fiber while being a night person is a sign of laziness or weak morality, or something I've never been able to quite figure out but is undeniably pejorative. Work isn't any more worthwhile merely for being done at 5 AM by someone who's gone to bed at 9 PM.
posted by holborne at 7:24 AM on November 10, 2015 [4 favorites]