Early to rise

It’s the kind of accomplishment that matters only to me, but to me it matters a lot. Somehow in the three and a half weeks since school vacation began, I’ve managed to get at least partway to a goal that has stymied me for years: resetting my internal alarm clock so that I can arise earlier even when I don’t have to.

During the school year, it’s not a problem, at least from Monday to Friday. I set the alarm early – 5:45 AM – because I have to. What gets me out of bed is not a sense of wakefulness or alertness but a sense of necessity: if I don’t get up right then, I won’t be ready for the basic requirements of the day, like getting the kids to school on time.

But for years, it’s been a perennial goal of mine to train myself to get up early even when I don’t need to. I knew that by letting myself doze until 7:30 or 8 on weekend mornings and vacation mornings, I was depriving myself of the much-needed opportunity for greater productivity. And yet I always had the same rationale: sleeping late is such a harmless pleasure. It doesn’t cause weight gain or high cholesterol. It doesn’t kill off brain cells. It doesn’t cost money. It doesn’t hurt the environment. Allowing myself to lounge in bed felt like the one thing I could do that didn’t cause damage to anyone or anything.

And after all the years when my children were really young and sleeping late wasn’t an option for me, I felt like I’d earned this harmless privilege by the time they finally – finally! – reached the age when they either slept late themselves or were able to keep themselves busy even if I was still in bed. Saturday mornings are the reward for years of maternal sleep deprivation, I told myself.

At the same time, it always gave me the sense that I was unnecessarily handicapping myself. I don’t mean to sound like a frenetic, type A person. I’m not a masochist when it comes to productivity: I just always have things I want to get done, and there were so many weekend mornings in the past when I would catch myself still cleaning up from breakfast well after ten a.m. and think, “If I’d been up at six, I would have already exercised and made that marinade for dinner and returned those emails. I’d be ahead of the game if I hadn’t let myself sleep ‘til eight.”

I even did research to try to change my ways. I actually googled “How to get up earlier.” But the answers I found were too obvious to be of any help: Go to bed earlier. (Well of course.) Start making yourself arise five minutes earlier a day until you get to the time you are striving for. (I couldn’t manage even five minutes.) I was looking for a magic answer, preferably something involving self-hypnosis or an inexpensive herbal remedy.

Instead, I focused on what could be gained. I thought of how I would feel if by the time the kids were ready for breakfast, I’d already exercised, dressed and showered. I thought about how maybe it would allow me to take some time later in the day to just sit and read the paper. I thought of all the ways I could use that extra hour – the one first thing in the morning, but also the one it gained me later in the day when I’d already accomplished some of what I wanted to for any given day.

So I redoubled my resolve, and strangely, I started to notice a difference. This summer vacation the kids are at home and I’m self-employed; there’s no compelling reason to get our day off to an early start. No one needs to be anywhere. But I found as school vacation began that I was awake at 6:30, so rather than rationalizing why it was okay to sleep another hour, I got up. And then I did it the next day. And the next.

I remembered that popular maxim about how it takes three weeks to instill a habit. “Just do this for three weeks,” I told myself. “Then it won’t seem so hard.”

It’s been a little more than three weeks, and indeed, it doesn’t seem so hard. Not most of the time. Yesterday I blew it, having been up late on Saturday night and consequently slept until eight on Sunday morning, but as my mother commented when I fretted that I’d blown my lead, “I don’t think there’s a national registry for getting-up-at-6:30 streaks.” This was a reference to my daily running streak, for which there is a national registry, one I can remain listed on only until I miss my daily mile. My mother made a good point, though: like a diet, blowing it one day wasn’t a big deal.

And indeed, I managed to get back on track. I was up just a little past 6:30 this morning and out running just a little after 7. (This summer’s notable heat wave has provided another incentive for me: it makes a huge difference if I can get my daily run out of the way before the sun is hitting the roadway full force.) So I’m back on track for now, and feeling good about it. I’m past three weeks and while this doesn’t exactly feel like a habit the way, say, my daily run does, it feels like something I’ve proved to myself I can do.

Earlier this year I came across this quotation from Ben Franklin: You will find the key to success under the alarm clock.” Gradually, I’m starting to see exactly what he means. I just need to keep remembering to set that alarm clock, and the success – or at least the chance at it -- will be right there waiting for me to unlock it, one morning at a time, day after day.