So this modern obsession with morning routines ; an ongoing battle between celebs, ceos, and influencers to flex, who can get up earlier, who can do more reading, and who can squeeze in more exercise before the crack of dawn.
Implicitly in all of this content there's a promise that's being made, a promise that if you can emulate habits of your favorite celebrity then you can potentially become a little bit more like them. In fact i bet most of us are not very proud of the fact that we need to smash the snooze button three or four times before getting out of bed.
But to be honest i don't think that's such a bad thing. Let me explain so for a while when i was a fresh-faced uni student, i bought into the hype. I believed all of the things that you were supposed to do to have a productive morning and apparently a productive life.
The 5 am alarm, the early morning cold shower, and any other activity that you might read online. But then my consistency began to fade, i ran into issues like many other people do. Issues that only really make sense with the benefit of hindsight and with a more well-rounded perspective, and issues that are rarely discussed in this space more generally.
Behaviour Change
You see a lot of self-help advice relies on the idea that there are two groups of people in the world. The successful and the unsuccessful. That there's a binary divide a kind of line between the two of them and the only way to cross this line is through behavior change.
and while obviously our behavior affects the trajectory of our lives, i think there's a bit of a mix-up here. The claim that's been made is that to become more like the people you may idolize, you should emulate them. When really what's happening a lot of the time is that the lifestyle that we're being presented with is a product of their success rather than a cause of it.
For a lot of people it's very difficult to spend a couple of hours each day engaging in largely unrelated activities when they have the constraints of work school or other pressures in their lives and it's quite easy to see why this causal angle is the one that's pushed more often.
When we look at the groups of people who are targeted by this more often than not this content targets people in their teens or early twenties those who are more likely to be in a state of turmoil in uncertainty about their futures and the direction of their lives.
But, also the group who are more likely to derive a sense of self-esteem from group membership, from feeling like they're sat at the table with the cool kids. These recipes for success don't really make any concession for individual differences especially within the group of people that they target most aggressively.
You'll never hear the fact that up to 16 of teens and young adults have delayed sleep phase. A condition which literally causes your sleep cycle to be offset from a traditional one and therefore makes a traditional sleep cycle really difficult to stick to.
It's not very reasonable to prescribe a one-size-fits-all solution to such a large audience with such intricate individual differences. We've kind of ended up in a situation where another person's idealized day-to-day situation is marketed as an achievable target for everybody else.
The Influence of media in Disseminating Information
As with most forms of media the most extreme story is what gets the clicks, and inspires other people to replicate similarly extreme stories. You end up with kind of homogenized cookie cutter approaches. Nobody's really interested in the person who rolls out of bed 30 minutes before they need to leave for work and they're still able to maintain a healthy work-life balance and despite what it may sound like.
i'm not against all kinds of routine or planning in life if it's something that adds value to your day then by all means go ahead. What i am against is taking the blueprint of someone else's life and trying to implant it directly onto your own with no regard for your individual state of
being.
it's important to understand your own physical and mental state as well as understanding the fact that your tastes and your preferences are bound to change over time. instead what i believe in is figuring out what you value and designing your day around giving yourself as much time and space for that as possible.
For me that looks like giving myself time and space to think uninterrupted in the morning and so i like to wake up at least two hours before i have any kind of formal commitment, and i like to spend at least an hour in the morning without a screen.
If you prefer to be up to date first thing in the morning or if you prioritize having additional sleep over spare time in the morning then why would you change that ?. Some answers in life can only come through experience and introspection rather than through blind copying and i think this here is one of them.
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