One ritual that I started a year ago was waking up at 5 AM every morning. Doing so gave me a tremendous amount of time to meditate, workout, eat, and get ready. And all without having to stress over getting somewhere in a rush.
And to be fair, I simply switched my wake up time to 6 AM now. But even just an hour can make a huge difference when having time to get ready, workout, eat, and meditate. So why did I decide that 5 AM is no longer the ideal morning routine as so many believe?
Who’s Who?
When I first started my fitness journey, one of the first things I did was find the exact routines of fitness celebrities. I needed to know when they slept, what they ate, and how they exercised. That meant figuring out how to meal prep the exactly meals they made, changing my work around to fit when they woke up and figuring out how to lift their exact weights.
That didn’t last long. I realized immediately that I can’t do what they do to the same level. And what’s the next excuse I made up? Fitness just wasn’t for me. “If I can’t do what they do, I might as well give up.”
I was very fortunate to have stumbled upon a video by Jeff Cavaliere on AthleanX. He was discussing the proper ways to build a nutritional diet. But one thing he made clear was this: Is it something you can keep doing in 10 years?
It’s a simple question. Yet one that’s not often asked in these days of bulking/cutting, dieting, and overall short-term process setting. What we are looking for is the optimal way to achieve the results we want. And that often means looking at star figures who have crossed those goals already. Then all we have to do is copy their processes for some amount of time. Simple as that.
But what happens after we get those results? Maybe we get the body we wanted. Maybe we achieve the grades we desired. But once we cross the finish line, we’re done. There’s no reason to keep up those same processes when we weren’t even enjoying them to begin with. Of course they wouldn’t last a lifetime in that context. But if we lose the processes that got us there, we stagnate and might even fall backwards to the starting line again. All we’ve accomplished in this scenario is to achieve a temporary goal by completely emulating habits that we don’t like or don’t work for us.
We’ve confused what works for the life of another for the life of ourselves. And we only don’t realize this because we never think to ask if this would work our whole life.
It’s…. Personal
Starting this semester, I was going to have certain obligations to meet that would keep me up past 9 PM some days of the week. I knew that I wanted to have around 8 hours of sleep every night. And shifting around my sleep schedule during the week itself wasn’t a healthy habit I wanted to build. Therefore I realized that trying to force the 5AM wake-up call in a schedule that doesn’t fit it has too many drawbacks.
But does that mean I’ll lose all the benefits of an otherwise amazing 5AM sleep schedule? Yes. But I won’t be missing out on them because I’m not waking up at 5AM. I’ll be missing out on them because it simply is not practical in my life right now. To say waking up at 5AM is an ideal for productivity that cannot fit in right now. To say to eat broccoli and brown rice all day is an ideal for weight loss that is unsustainable.
For other people’s lives the ideal scenario may work. But it’s up to us to find what is ideal in the parameters of our own lives. Sometimes that means changing things up to the next best thing or finding new opportunities for growth. But the important thing to ask when you do change is this: “Would I be willing to do this for a lifetime?”
