Mornings have always eluded me. Never have been an early riser. I've stayed awake till morning many times, even went out running at 5 am after staying up all night ( which was very stupid ), but never woken up that early. For the sake of this post let's consider early as anything before 7 am. It's a story of how a night owl tried to get a feel of how early birds face their days.
Before getting to the meat n potatoes chapati-palya of the matter, I do want to set the context about the "Experiments" I keep putting myself through. Trying to quit Instagram and go crawling back to it 😮💨, fasting for 16 hours to month(s) long alternate day fasts (ADF), trying all the hacks to build habits and doing rounds of introspection about what feeds my energy, finding out about all the sneaky addictions and more shit like that. This has been an ongoing journey for quite a while, here's a screenshot from my diary from a couple of years ago.
Not all of the experiments are geared towards bringing about a change or about building new habits. A lot of the experiments are just for fun, to kill time and take my mind away from asking questions with no answers. The 38-Day experiment is one such kind. It was just an exploratory ride into the mornings. The YouTuber JerryRigEverything has a channel tagline that goes something like this, "Life is a DIY Project". I'd tweak it a little bit to say "Life is just experiments nested within experiments" 😛.
Not another day goes by without my Appa asking me to get up early and as a night owl it idea was teetering on the edge of impossibility. Also, YES! night owls and early birds are not just words describing the sleeping patterns of people. It's true even at the genetic level, I learnt this fact from the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
At this point, my only question was,
"Is it possible for a night owl to become an Early Bird?"
I got my answer as I quickly made my way through the book. The suprachiasmatic nucleus ( yep, quite a mouthful word ) is the part of the brain which is responsible for regulating our circadian rhythm. Turns out that it is able to adjust to new sleeping patterns given enough time and maintaining the new pattern.
The next course of action was quite evident but with a caveat. The challenge of *actually* getting up early. I had no clue how I would approach this problem, in the past setting dozens of alarms across all my smart speakers and phones has failed miserably. The right question was "what would be motivationally potent enough to persuade me to get off the bed ".
The Results
Game streaming. You might be thinking that I'd be crazy to wake up at 5 am and stream games to no one. That's exactly what I did 😂. I get to play games early in the morning and stream it as well. Streaming did two things, it brought in that peppy excitement (of streaming it to no one) and also served as another experiment. I already had a channel where I streamed games on and off. It was time to play some games at 5 am ( Still sounds so wrong lol ).
The first day was very rough, tried to sleep by 10 pm and stayed awake till 5 am instead. The goal was to stream for at least 40 mins and I couldn't do that either. I partly blame it on the game's (Half-Life 2) creepy ambient soundscape which made me extremely queasy.
The first week went rough, getting anywhere between 0-4 hours of sleep every night was a train heading towards a broken bridge over a hearty valley. I eventually stopped playing Half-Life 2 and moved on to newer games which worked out much better. If you have too much free time on your hands, you can skim through the beginnings and endings of the streams where I talk to myself about how the experiment was going.
By the 20th day, there were drastic changes, the train had travelled through the valley, with the bridge barely holding on. I was consistently streaming for about an hour every morning and managed not to go back to sleep right after I finished streaming. The 6:30 am - 8 am block of time used to be filled with mental hyperactivity in a good-creative way. It didn't change much of how the rest of my days used to go, but it had the potential to set the tone for the entire day. After 30 days of this madness, it had actually worked. I had finally become an early bird (or emulating an early bird ?). Used to wake up consistently by 4:30 am without any alarms and not feeling dead. More importantly, my sleep quality had improved immensely. I used to get sleepy by 10 and fall asleep in less than 10mins of hitting the bed. This was the bigger revelation. I'm generally a very bad sleeper, plagued by thought worms and earworms, it usually takes me anywhere around 40 mins to an hour to fall asleep. The sleep in the later stages of the experiment was of the highest quality in the last decade.
There used to be days when I would wake up and have an intense debate in my head of whether I should actually get off the bed and stream games. This makes me question my love for playing games. Maybe after weeks of no one watching the peppy energy of streaming died 🤔.
The new plan was to keep it going as long as possible and use this newfound early bird energy to improve productivity. As you have already guessed, the experiment came to an abrupt end after 38 days. I had to change cities for a week or two and I couldn't carry my desktop PC. My old habits or just natural tendency as a night owl took hold and I was back to a night owl schedule in less than a week. I did wake up at 5 am even after I stopped streaming, but it was very easy to fall back to sleep.
Without any potent motivational factors, waking up was not going to be enough to keep up the habit. Phew!, it takes so much energy to just keep up waking early. It's like waking up early tax (WUET) which is paid only by night owls. I think the stay up late tax (SULT) for early birds is waay lower than WUET.
Before I go off on a tangent, let's wrap this up. It was one of the more fun experiments in a while, actually played some good games and picked up some new streaming skills. After finishing the book, I have a newfound respect for sleeping 8 hours a night. Nothing is worth sacrificing the sleep. I do wish to become an early bird at the push of a button, sadly it just doesn't seem to work that way. Maybe a longer-term experiment ( like 6-18 months ) would provide more answers? seems fun and painful at the same time.
I'm early days into my grad studies I could definitely use some early bird energy and a good sleeping pattern. Plus, I'm pretty sure I won't be changing cities for at least a couple of years. I could go in for the second edition of the 38-day experiment, with a more scientific approach instead of just jumping into it with no specific goals. Plus playing games early morning as a grad student feels very exciting.
P.S. I really don't know if this blog needs a comment section, I've been lazy and haven't come around setting it up.
