I’ve always been a night owl. Even when I had to go to school at 7:30am, I would wake up at 7:00am and bike as fast as I could to school to barely make it. Once I got to college, I took one 9:00am class thinking it would be fine, especially since I was doing 7:00am already (it was not fine). I never took a 9:00am again. With freedom in my schedule, I began waking up at 10:00am and have most of my classes in the evening.

Today, I wake up around 6 or 7 everyday. What changed? Was it all the hustle content creators telling me that waking up at 4am changed their life? The main reason these people talk about waking up early is because it allows you to get ahead of the pack. The reality is that most people are oriented around a 9-5 and therefore they wake up early at 7 or 8 to commute to work. If you wake up far before that, you now have more time than them. This is an extreme wake up time, but it’s meant to be extreme. Otherwise you would fall in the middle of the curve. However, this doesn’t really suggest you will do extreme things. Most viewers will probably wake up at 4am early once and then realize they are about to pass out at 7pm.

The 8 hours of bedtime still needs to be respected. Regardless of if you sleep 8 hours, you need to sleep. No one talks about how the 4am wake up choice means you will need to start getting ready for bed at 7pm. While you can get ahead of the pack in the morning, you may want to be part of the pack at night. For the same reasons most people wake up at 7 or 8 to commute to their 9-5, most people go out and socialize starting 8-9pm (at least in NYC) to have fun. If that’s your bedtime, you will miss out on very real social connections.

It’s super easy to feel like you need to be a lone wolf that grinds at the crack of dawn, especially if you are looking up how to wake up early. No one really talks about how opportunities come from socializing or how important social recovery is or just connecting with other human beings. There’s a bit of glorification of grinding by yourself but we really are social creatures.

So you’ll have to make a concession. For me, it’s oriented around my work. Currently, I work from 9am - 7pm. I am online (reachable) before 9am and after 7pm too. For me to get my exercise in, I need to wake up earlier. I have ambitious goals of working out and running, so I try and do a run in the morning and a lift at night. I am still a young 20-something in New York, so I still go out at 10pm on weekends. I usually do dinners at 7pm on weekdays. This means I sleep from 10:30pm - 7:00am wakeup. And on the weekends, I shift it over to midnight - 9am wake up. If I have to work on the weekends, I still have a doable schedule.