Since his first job, Connor Swenson has wanted to be a morning person. The co-founder of Forgewell, an education and training consultancy, has envied those with a routine that allowed focus and achievement at the start of the day.
“I tried setting early alarms, signing up for morning gym classes and even taking cold showers. While I would manage for a week or two, I’d eventually hit the snooze button and fall back into my old routine,” he writes on the Make Time blog.
But he was revived by sunlight. He decided to replace his early morning coffees – which just seemed to demand heavier doses throughout the day – with sunlight. He was motivated by Stanford neuroscientist and podcaster Andrew Huberman whose research suggests getting early morning exposure to sunlight is vital to wake up the body and brain.
Within a few weeks, Mr. Swenson started to notice some real differences in how he felt each morning. He was waking up consistently without relying on alarm clocks, as if his body was naturally synchronizing with the rhythm of the day. He felt alert and energized just after waking, reducing his dependence on caffeine. Getting out for his jolt of sunlight delayed his first coffee and in turn eliminated the mid-afternoon crash.
He was also finding it easier to fall asleep at night. “It turns out that’s not just me, but it’s actually the downstream effect of morning sunlight. By getting enough light in the morning, you effectively kickstart your circadian rhythm, so by nightfall, your body more naturally gets ready for sleep,” he writes.
He was living in London, England at the time, where the sun is not all that common. But even walking on a cloudy day left him awake and energized. “It turns out that the sun is so powerful that even on cloudy days, plenty of light energy is still bursting through those dreary gray skies,” he says. During the winter months, when he was rising before the sun, he used a light therapy lamp to compensate for some of the missing sunshine.
That may be a routine – or set of routines, because it varies with the seasons – you might want to try. Productivity consultant Laura Vanderkam, who studies and advises on routines, says an important factor is that they change with the seasons and our lives. “I always love reading about other people’s routines too. But no matter how elaborate the routine, I know it is just a snapshot in time,” she writes on her blog.
For parents of young children, their routines – school and extra-curricular activates - can drive everyone in the family’s routines. They have to get up earlier in fall when school starts and perhaps be driven to activities after school, while also accommodating the demands of your work schedule. It can be annoying when that changes aspects of the routine you covet.
“I think the most helpful metaphor is to view a schedule like a garden. It can be a thing of beauty, for sure. To make that beauty happen, though, you need to do some hard work at the beginning of the season to set it up. You plant your annuals and see what didn’t make it through the winter or has gotten eaten by deer. Even once everything is up and running you have to water regularly, and prune, and weed. You don’t have to build a new garden every day, but there is never a moment where you can just set it and forget it,” Ms. Vanderkam writes.
Even the best routines can sometimes outlive their usefulness, she advises, or their usefulness might wax and wane. But they propel our lives and can even help us become morning people.
Quick hits
- Cut yourself some slack. Business coach Stephen Lynch advises setting aside 10 per cent of your workweek – at least four hours – as a buffer for unexpected stuff.
- We tend to underestimate how much ruminating on stressful situations drains our energy, says leadership consultant Nataly Kogan. Instead, practise acceptance, which is a two-step procedure. Acknowledge the situation with clarity, focusing on the facts you know to be true, and then identify one step to move forward with less stress and struggle.
- Vacation notes from consultant Braden Kelley: If you feel guilty that you did not check-in at work, you’re not on holiday. If you check your voicemail or email, you’re not on vacation. If you long for work while you’re on vacation, do something more interesting on vacation.
- Curiosity is the beginning of knowledge, notes Atomic Habits author James Clear, while action is the beginning of change.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.