I’ve been obsessing on habits for several months now (I’ve been thinking about them for a couple of years). One of the questions I keep coming back to is what is a good habit and what’s a bad habit?
When people talk about changing habits they are inevitably talking about making good ones and breaking bad ones. And the examples they use tend to be pretty obvious:
- Smoking = bad
- Exercise = good
- Vegetables = good
- Soda = bad
So first of all, if you smoke tobacco or get blackout drunk more than rarely or never eat anything that’s not beige… sure, that’s bad stuff. Those are big bad habits that you should probably try to change.
But for most habits that people sell, it’s not that cut and dried. This is the realm of what I think of as life-hacking types of habits. The little stuff that’s supposed to lead to big change. So if you just do morning pages, or walk at lunch, or reorganize your fridge…
Getting up early is my favorite example. So. Many. People will tell you that getting up early is the key to making everything in your life better. If you just drag ass out of bed at 4am, you will suddenly have all the time you need for physical fitness, meditation, personal growth, etc.
I call bullshit.
Now, if you are at risk of losing your job because you are constantly late in the morning or you miss out on important things in your life because the early hours just drag on or you can’t manage to get yourself up out of bed, like, ever… well, obviously those are bad habits (the last could be a sign of depression). So you want to see about working on that sort of situation.
But if you are getting up at a reasonable time, after a generally reasonable amount of sleep, and getting yourself to whatever job or tasks you have planned with some semblance of togetherness… YOU ARE DOING FINE.
And if you naturally wake up at the ass crack of dawn and that works for you — as long as you recognize that you turn into a pumpkin at 9pm — then YOU ARE ALSO FINE.
And if you organize your life around the fact that you are most productive and happy during the wee hours and can only get to sleep starting at 4am… DITTO DOING FINE.
In fact, if you are mostly awake during the times you need to be and get enough sleep at other time, good for you. You have acknowledged your personal chronotype and done your best to craft a productive life around that. WIN!
Messing with that by trying to get up and suddenly being productive at a time when your body is telling you to please get some sleep is just going to fuck you up.
Teenagers are a great example of this. During the teen years, kids naturally start staying up later and getting up later. And any parent who’s had to get their teen up in the morning knows this. Smart school districts (like mostly in other countries where schools are run through a process of research and logic and not wild experimentation and partisan brinkmanship) have discovered that shifting to a later class schedule starting in middle school leads to better grades, less truancy, and higher graduation rates (suck it Benjamin Franklin!).
The budding psychonaut is an extreme example of this. In fact, I believe the mismatch between his sleep/wake schedule and his school schedule (and class started at 8:15, not as early as some) was responsible for a chunk of his issues in high school and contributed to his switching to the joint HS/Community College scholarship program he’s in now. His classes start at 11 or noon and he’s up at 9, ready and happy, working hard, and getting great grades (despite being a 15yo college freshman). I’d like to think it’s the autonomy and challenge, but I can’t help but suspect the schedule as well.
My own morning goes like this. Coffee is set to grind and brew (through the magic of technology) at 6:15. The grinder noise usually filters into my sleep and starts me on the road to waking up. My backup alarm (an old fashioned battery operated bell alarm) goes off at 6:45, but I usually wake up on my own beforehand and turn it off. We get coffee and sip it in bed together, chatting about our day, catching weather and traffic, and reading each other news tidbits for about 20 or 30 minutes. This time is critical for not only my general well being, but our marriage — particularly when the kid was less autonomous and we desperately needed the grownup time.
That’s how I like to wake up. Gently and with the help of caffeine and a lack of stress.
Know what happens if I get up earlier? Nothing. The waking up process just takes longer. So I get up an hour earlier and instead of easing into the day with coffee for half an hour, it takes a corresponding hour longer. There’s no benefit. And if I try to get myself to actually do anything during this time, well it won’t happen or it won’t be good or useful.
If I exercise before the coffee’s settled, I’ll be sick. If I try to focus on something creative, my brain rebels. If I try to meditate, I’ll fall right back to sleep. Why should I fight that and feel terrible all day? Because some YouTube guru is convinced that because a few billionaires get up early that getting up early will turn you into a billionaire? Talk about getting the arrow of causality backward!
Some people are good in the morning and some better at night. And some people are massively driven and prefer working morning, noon, and night to anything else. Good for them, I’ll be relaxing over here.
So when you consider habits, don’t be so quick to label them good or bad. For every “stop smoking” or “floss your teeth” there are 100 ideas that might be good or bad habits, just depending on who you are. Don’t eat crap is probably good advice for everyone. But what do you eat instead? Some people do great being vegans and others thrive on paleo. Some folks need many tiny meals and others do well with intermittent fasting. Eating more actual food and less foodlike processed substances is a GOOD HABIT, but dig into the details and it really does depend.
The real question is, will this habit make my life better — based on my own definition of better? Start there and everything starts to fall into place.
