Like most high school students with no set bureaucratic schedule to answer to, I stayed up very late over the summer.
I stayed up so late that after a while I was only sleeping after the sun came up. I spent my nights playing Super Smash Bros Melee and searching Facebook to shoot the breeze with like-minded nocturnals. After a few weeks of this vampirish existence, I decided to go full-circle and stay up to experience the dawn and early morning hours. When I crashed that night at 9 p.m. and woke up the next morning at 6:30 a.m., I was amazed.
Is this what morning could be like? I heard birds chirping outside my window, felt the warm early sunlight through my kitchen shades, and most importantly, I didn’t feel like taking an olympic-class dive back into bed. I was rested after a great sleep and, somehow, the day seemed mine for the taking.
School has conditioned me to dread the morning, to think of it as an early unit of the new day necessarily plagued by darkness, rushed breakfasts and unavoidable tardies. But if you take a moment, preempt all that stress and wake up 20 minutes earlier than you do now, you could turn the worst part of your day into a not-so-bad starting point.
When I don’t spend my late night hours cramming homework, I get up a bit early. I pleasantly gather my clothes onto my body, jaunt downstairs and enjoy a nice, if elderly, bowl of oats over a digital copy of the New York Times. The beauty of this time is that you can make it whatever you want, because it’s slotted in before the stresses and requirements of your day.
If you want to get up and do all of the coming day’s homework, that’s your choice. You might actually find yourself more focused on that physics problem after a night’s rest than you would after your long day yesterday.
This experiment is definitely not going to overhaul your natural chronotype or sleep preferences, but you may find that school’s set schedule of late-work and early-rise have been forcing you to think of morning in an undeserving light. It’s actually a great time to get stuff done (that’s not necessarily due your first period).
A change of pace can surprise you with how it affects the rest of your day. You might even find yourself switching from a self-labeled night owl into a lame morning bird like me.
After I finish my retiree breakfast, I go into school relaxed (if still a little tired). Try it out. Don’t be morning bigoted.