waking up at 5am, happier than ever?

I am a night owl, not by choice, but by nature.

I always knew this — I tend to get what feels like my best sleep between the hours of 4:30 - 8:00AM. I can easily stay up until 3AM. In my early twenties, I had a job with a shift that started at 6:15AM with an hour commute; I spent every day in a somnambulant daze.

I have one of those Oura rings that tells me when I get the most restful sleep, and calculates my ideal bedtime — somehow, absurdly — it’s 1:11AM! Society seems to correlate people who naturally go to bed late as lazy degenerates, but there is science behind different sleep chronotypes being an evolutionary thing.

So when I heard one of my best friends raving about waking up before her kids and getting an hour of two of time to herself in the morning, I immediately brushed it off as something that wouldn’t work for me. I continued to push my bedtime later, swiping through TikToks or binge-watching K-dramas on the couch until the wee hours of the morning, stealing back my time after my kid and husband went to bed.

That was all fine, until I started writing again.

I realized my brain no longer wants to write at night.

Writing fiction late into the night was something I did easily as a preteen — it was one of my favorite hobbies. No one was barging in on me writing my silly little stories in the computer room past 10PM.

As a mom, though…I’ve found that my brain is completely clocked out past 8PM. There’s no bringing it back online until I get some sleep.

Sometime just after Thanksgiving last year, I started waking up around 5AM to write. The amount I was able to get done shocked me, but I also felt like a new woman: accomplishing something entirely for myself before the sun came up gave me a new sense of control, and the best part was that I could replicate the schedule whether or not I had childcare that day.

Can I always wake up at 5AM to write? Definitely not! In order to wake up that early, I have to be in bed around 9:30PM, which is not always possible.

We’re also just coming out of a few weeks of second molar teething back to back with an awful virus that led to a bacterial infection for my toddler, and sleep has been terrible for all of us. During times like these, I have to leave extra productivity goals on the back burner while we get back on track.

But — I’m looking forward to having my mornings back soon. It’s likely the only way I’ll be able to complete a manuscript in 2025.

I might be going against my body’s natural inclination of ‘late to bed, late to rise’, but being a mom has blown up my entire life anyway! At this point, I’m open to change.