Early bird? More like early worm
As a lifelong self-proclaimed night owl I hated the very idea of waking up early but due to circumstances beginning with kindergarten all the way through ten years of school and seven years of med school most of my days started at 6.30 (I know the time is not that bad compared to some other folks’ daily life, but still). It was almost three kilometers walking distance to school and later it was an hour and a half (or more, if I got sloppy and got stuck in traffic) ride in a smelly, often stuffed public bus to the city’s center, where most of the universities are.
Then there is a seasonal change: it is rather nice and refreshing at 6.30 in the morning in the summer in the area I am from, but most importantly it was already light outside. But of course times change and here we go October — November — December etc. waking up and getting out of the house becomes increasingly similar to getting into outer space: it is dark, cold, and there are only a few other enthusiasts doing the same. Then you have to plow through, often not yet cleaned from the night, snowfall to walk to school or to the bus stop.
Thus it had always seemed to me that people who had “a calling” and woke up that early on their own especially on weekends are either alien life form or straight out masochists. That was the case until I got my stereotyped and rather lazy bottom to the part of the planet where not only it is considered a cold winter with +17C at night but also the year-round variation of the day length was minuscule compared to my previous experience. Here I must also mention at least some of my “conversion” is likely due to getting older, being able to focus more and concentrate on my life goals rather than going through school because they say “that’s what you do after kindergarten” and because “everyone who’s not a failure does it” (even though some of the sayers use their diplomas mostly as a door-stopper or an irrefutable argument against their own children).
So we’ve been in tropics for two-three weeks and one of those days where I may have been in REM sleep (my hypothesis at the time was that it may be easier to wake in REM sleep since the brain is already in a sort of conscious state with an added benefit of remembering a bizarro dream about giant walking carrots; unfortunately I could not find any prove to the hypothesis on PubMed later) or just already surfacing around 6 a.m. I was woken by the rays of sunlight reaching through the glass doors into the bedroom of our apartment at the time.
I was quite shocked to get out of sleep just like that and no drama. I had no idea what to do but I was wide awake and thus decided to go through the morning routine. Then since my spouse was still asleep, I went out to the laundromat, then cooked breakfast, then read a book, and then it turned out to be only 8 in the morning — what a marvelous turn of events! Needless to say, I was ideologically converted in a day or two of similarly starting early mornings. Living close to the equator brought forth an early bird in me or is it I who brought the Siamese partridge into it’s proper habitat.
The phenomenon of such an awakening is called (not surprisingly) self-awakening and there’s been some research into it, tentatively suggesting that it could be helpful in reducing sleep inertia (period of impaired performance and grogginess experienced after waking). Sleep inertia actually has a reason to exist since it has a positive impact on our sleep: when you’ve been woken up briefly, it helps to go back to sleep. But it gets counterproductive especially if you put a general, day to day sleep deprivation into the equation. Attempting self-awakening seems to decline the waking threshold immediately before awakening, leading to less sleep inertia and reduced daytime sleepiness.
Back to my saga though — as we moved around the region, my schedule was thrown off more than a few times but now it was easier to come back to it and I knew the value of the early hours of the day. One of the few very important things about our lives that we can change is adopting a sustained regimen — let’s face it we are creatures of habit (some may even argue that we are our habits), it takes time and it is hard but once established the habit is there for realsies. And we actually can choose the better ones, not only be forced or getting passively into the other kind.
Note: however this sort of intervention would be less helpful if you are truly a night person (check out this post by Dr. Novella about sleep jetlag), and of course the post is about a habit NOT about dependency and addiction which are a totally different kettle of fish.
