5:00 am for 30 days

early-riser-clockToday is the second day of my 30-day trial of waking up at 5:00am. So far so good!

Why five? Five gives me at least 1 and up to 2 full hours before my daughter wakes up. And they are prime time hours for me. I am best in the morning. I meditate most clearly, I write most coherently, and I feel most alive. I love being awake as the rest of the world arises, as the sky lightens, as the birds begin their calls, and even as the neighbors begin turning on their lights and getting in their cars to head off to work.

There is something about witnessing the transition from night to day that seems to fuel me through the rest of my day. I’m reminded of the Rumi poem:

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.

There are people moving back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

I want to be awake for the secrets the dawn breeze has to tell me. I want to feel the clarity inherent in the pre-dawn silence and carry that clarity into my day. I want to be awake at dawn so that I can know more clearly what it is that I really want and ask for it in the silence of the dawn.

From a purely practical standpoint these extra hours give me time to meditate, exercise, write, get outside and honor my need for solitude. Once my day officially “begins” I find it very easy to neglect these things that are critical elements of my self-care program.

These morning hours are “found” time or free time. I can do what I want with these hours without hearing the distant drum of responsibility beating in the background.

The question you might be asking at this point is: why have I not chosen to rise early before this?

It’s a great question, and the answer is that I was stuck in an outdated and no longer necessary pattern that began when my daughter was born.

For the first 18-months of my daughter’s life, our sleep patterns were very erratic. For better or worse, we did not enforce a sleep schedule on Ella, allowing her to nap if she wanted and go to sleep when she was tired. This obviously led to some late nights and early mornings – quite a few very early mornings! But overall, Ella has learned to regulate her own sleep patterns and now goes to bed consistently between 7:30 – 9:00 and wakes up between 6:00 – 7:00.

But even though Ella has been sleeping fairly consistently for the past year, I never broke out of the fear-based pattern of needing to sleep as late as I could to make up for her potential middle-of-the-night hungry time or arising, ready to play, at 4:30. So for the past few months I’ve probably been getting far too much sleep.

The catalyst for this decision to wake at 5:00 was Steve Pavlina’s excellent article on how to become an early riser. He lays out a straightforward method for becoming an early riser. The bottom line being, don’t force yourself into bed when you’re not tired. Rather, listen to your body and learn to know when it is time for sleep.

It makes total sense. Without Steve’s guidelines I probably would have forced myself to bed at 9:00 last night. Instead, starting at about 9:30, I unwound from the day and read for a while until I felt sleep beginning to sneak up on me. I went upstairs to bed at 10:15 and was asleep before 10:30. Waking up this morning at 5:00 was not a problem. I’m very interested to see how this plays out over the next 30-days. I’ll keep you posted.

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Posted by Edward Mills | Filed Under Parenting, Physical Body, Well-Being