Of all the pillars of internet content, surely the strongest is the genre where people outline their morning routines in grave and sanctimonious detail. They exist in every medium, on every platform, in every internet subculture.
TikTok has Be prepared with mess, where influencers chat about their plethora of skin-nourishing serums and artisanal makeup products. Beauty has more glamorous cousins on YouTube, Vogue Beauty SecretsWhere dewy-skinned celebrities take us through the many things they do with their faces every morning.
Swap tips about the best way to blog artists keep morning leaf. Powerful women, titans of their respective industries, tell the cut”How do I accomplish this?” and then LinkedIn And YouTubeLifehackers share their morning tricks to boost productivity.
Fruitful mornings are the days that really take over these days, in the wellness world and are a favorite of risers and grinders alike. The reigning king of productivity rituals is Andrew Huberman, The Controversial Stanford neuroscientist and podcaster whose routine is always chronicled in vlogs.”Scientifically perfect“
Huberman’s morning routine Straddles the thin line between melodious and tyrannical sounds, depending on your persuasion. He wakes up every day within an hour of sunrise, and then goes outside for a 10-minute walk (30 minutes if it’s cloudy) for optimal morning light exposure. He drinks electrolytes (for hydration) but abstains from food or caffeine while he does 90 minutes of deep work (no emails, lots of deep research). Then he drinks caffeine, exercises vigorously and plunges into the cold. (Cold showers will work, too, he says). He doesn’t eat until lunch.
At the start of the day, the rigid capitalist clock demands forward motion, but the soft creature of the human body wants nothing more than to sleep comfortably in a bed.
This routine is internet catnip. Social media followed Huberman’s routine for a large number of people with videos and articles day or a week or a months or a year and document the results. one, The vlogger even checks his testosterone levels Her months-long before-and-after tests proved that Huberman’s protocol increased her levels. (At this point it is worth noting that Not all of Huberman’s ideas stand up to scrutiny.)
Huberman’s ritual is intense, but the fascination it suggests is neither unusual nor new. People have always been fascinated by the right way to spend a morning and how everyone else is (allegedly) doing it. At the start of the day, the rigid capitalist clock demands forward motion, but the tender creature of the human body wants nothing more than to sleep comfortably in bed. Maybe it’s so hard to get up, that’s why it’s so strongly associated with virtue.
According to the association. After all, how we spend our mornings determines how we want to spend our days and consequently our entire lives. Our longing for those sacred daylight hours gives us a glimpse of what we really value.
Moral of the morning
The idea that sleeping late is a sin has its roots in Western culture. Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius spent a lot meditation – the notes he wrote to himself throughout his second-century reign, Newly popular among tech bros Passionate – punishing himself for his shortcomings. These include having trouble getting out of bed in the morning. “In the morning when you rise involuntarily, let this thought be present – I am rising to the work of a man.” He instructed himself. Although it is true that lying in bed is “more pleasant,” after all, “Are you there for your pleasure, and not for work and toil?”
Jonathan Edwards, the influential early American theologian, agreed with Aurelius. “I think Christ suggested early rising, by his rising from the grave.” He wrote in a diary entry in 1728; He himself rose at 4 a.m. and spent 13 hours a day studying Christ. When Benjamin Franklin laid out his ideal schedule in his 1771 autobiography, he suggested waking up at 5 a.m. to pray, shower, eat breakfast, and plan the day.
You can see why many of us have come to believe that the morning is more virtuous than the afternoon or evening, and that the morning is more important than any other time of the day. Hours have a strict moral ranking – like the old days when breakfast was the most important meal of the day (which, it turns out, was A myth propagated by serial lobbyists and cults)
That’s more or less the logic behind the endless deluge of modern morning routine content: you need to optimize your morning, not your afternoon, because the morning is when it’s essential (some would say expedient) to change your routine.
“A morning routine is one of the most powerful ways to influence your long-term success,” a blog post for AI Productivity in 2022 Coach Reese explains. “Morning is when you have a clean slate and are still unaffected by the events of the day. It means you can choose tasks more consciously, deciding which ones will help you.”
“Many of us are busy, have many responsibilities and obligations, and often feel strapped for time,” In 2023 the wellness site Veriwell acknowledged. “A great morning routine can make all the difference in being productive, achieving goals, feeling organized, and doing it all with confidence.”
or, A redditor put it“I like to have some productive routine that I can follow to give me a reason to get up every morning.”
There is some evidence for the idea that how you spend your morning will affect the rest of your day. A 2024 Stanford Medical School study It has been found that going to bed and getting up early is associated with better mental health than going to bed and getting up late. Meanwhile, A 2016 study in Harvard Business Review (HBR) found that customer service representatives who started the day in a good mood typically stayed that way throughout the day, even when they had to deal with terrible customers. (Terrifyingly, the HBR takeaway is that managers should send their employees “morning morale-boosting messages.” What better way to kill a good mood than hearing Steve in the C-suite wish you had a great life? Crushing those numbers in the morning?)
But do we really need to optimize mornings to increase well-being so we can be better at business? What we really want is being an unbiasedly healthy productivity machine?
What mornings look like for artists and bosses
The routines of famous artists, which are repeated over and over again like little myths, are not so much focused on cheerfulness as on developing an intense emotional state. As such, they usually involve monk-like austerities or taking many, many stimulants. The idea with this type of routine was to discipline yourself into creativity or to awaken it by any chemical means necessary.
In his 2013 book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Mason Curry reports that author Patricia Highsmith, to make writing as enjoyable as possible, would start writing in bed, with cigarettes, coffee, vodka, donuts and a saucer of plain sugar. He said Proust fueled his own work with opium, coffee, caffeine tablets, and then the sedative barbital to counteract the caffeine.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, Curry tells us that Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope would wake up at 5:30 a.m. and spend three hours at his desk before heading to his day job at the post office. Beethoven woke up at dawn, counted the 60 beans from which he would make a cup of coffee, and then sat at his desk working until 2 or 3 p.m., periodically rejuvenating himself by walking outside.
The morning wellness routine is rhetorically positioned as both a diet and a capitalist virtue
Today’s most famous morning routines land between the Beethoven and Highsmith camps. They focus heavily on wellness and self-care: extensive skin care ritual patting, daily workouts that have become as universally mandatory as bathing.
Arianna Huffington, oprah, Steve JobsAnd Jack Dorsey All do some combination of meditation and gratitude journaling. Cameron Diaz And Jennifer Aniston Drink lots of water. Everyone exercises. (Not really – everyone: Arianna Huffington, oprah, Jack Dorsey, Tim Armstrong, Karen Blackett, Hans Vestberg, Vittorio Colo, Tim Cook, Barack Obama, Jennifer Aniston, Kim Kardashian, Martha Stewart, Giorgio Armani.)
The morning wellness routine is rhetorically positioned as both an indulgence and a capitalist virtue. By taking time to tend to your physical body and mental health in the morning, the theory is, you’ll be able to do more later. That, in fact, is why Andrew Huberman does all those things: to optimize his productivity. (Could it be that some of these people aren’t being 100 percent transparent about their perfectly plotted morning routines? The thought crossed my mind.)
“A lot of times, people say, ‘How can I lift more, focus better, remember things better?'” Huberman explains in a video. “And it’s like, ‘Well, let’s think about the basics of this.'” His morning is set to make him better at lifting, focusing, remembering — which is to say, working.
Ten years ago, morning routines were also about “rising and grinding,” but in a different way. CEOs will report Roll out of bed at 4am and get right to their emails. “I can’t bear to do nothing!” One CEO told the Guardian in 2013 about his email routine. At the time, there was no mention of the screen-free morning wonder, meditation, and journaling that have become fundamental to today’s high-productivity routines.
Perhaps our current moment looks like the collective trauma of the Trump era and the rise and grind of years after the pandemic that sent everyone searching for new ways to cope without betraying the capitalist imperative to achieve more. White-collar workers spent the better part of two years not being allowed to do anything other than work and obsess over their health. Now we are obsessed with our health to do more.
Our morning priorities show us what we value. And what we value in the moment, it seems, is trying to keep our frazzled minds and bodies together and give the best we can of ourselves to the work our world demands of us. What else can we manage in a morning’s work?
