Updated July 2025
I step off the muddy path, dew already soaking through the cloth of my martial arts shoes. The stream hums behind me, curving away into the trees as the old priory comes into view, rising slowly from behind the hedgerow like a stone ship in the mist. I cross the manicured lawn, quiet, wet, green as memory. My feet glide through the grass. The building is abandoned, quiet, serene. I’ve done my Tai Chi here every morning for weeks now, just before the sun starts warming the bricks. It’s become a ritual. A stillness I enter, not perform.
But it wasn’t always like this.
The Secret Contradiction of My Life
For years, I fought with mornings — and lost. I believed I should be a morning person. My life already looked like one: I was productive, driven, always juggling projects — building software, teaching Tai Chi, homeschooling my son, launching a crumpet business, writing for my site, coding GTD systems from scratch, mentoring, teaching coding classes to kids. I lived in systems. I taught balance. I believed in discipline. And yet I was still staying up too late, night after night, glued to the sofa, drowning in YouTube videos I didn’t even care about.
I wasn’t lazy. But I was stuck.
This was the great, secret contradiction of my life. I was a man who could build a complex GTD ecosystem from scripts and open-source software, but who couldn’t command himself to go to sleep.
The cycle was as predictable as it was demoralizing. A long day of work, projects, and family duties would end when my son finally went to bed around nine. A profound sense of relief would wash over me. “Finally,” I’d think, “some time for myself.” I felt I had earned it, that I deserved this quiet pocket of time to unwind.
But that unwinding was a trap. Every night, I’d tell myself I deserved it — just a bit of downtime, a reward. After work, after parenting, after projects, after driving my son around, I’d finally be “free” around 9:30. And with nothing structured left in the day, I’d fall into the inertia of it: screen on, one video, then another, then another. Ten o’clock would become midnight, would become 1 a.m. I’d groan, pull myself to bed, and wake up tired. Every. Damn. Day.
I wasn’t sleeping in. I’d still wake up at seven, functional enough to start my day. But I was operating on a deficit—and not just a sleep deficit. It was a deficit of integrity. My sleep was shallow, blue-light saturated, interrupted by a body that never really got the memo that the day was over. I felt dulled, like I was never running at full power. And I knew it. That was the worst part. I felt like I was constantly betraying myself — the man I was supposed to be, the one I already knew how to be. The guilt compounded over time, a slow erosion of my own self-respect.
The hours I stole from the morning were never truly enjoyed in the evening; they were just wasted, leaving a residue of fatigue and disappointment that coloured the entire next day.
A Simple Solution to Wake Up Early
It wasn’t for lack of trying. I had alarms. A vibrating Fitbit so I wouldn’t wake my wife. I had routines. Timers. Promises. Some of it worked — for a few days. But the late nights always crept back in, like water seeping through cracked tile. I kept trying to fight the mornings instead of fixing the nights.
The turning point, when it came, wasn’t a lightning bolt of inspiration or a complex new productivity hack. It was a quiet, uncomfortable admission. The solution was tragically simple: I just had to go to bed earlier.
But the practical simplicity of the act hid a profound emotional cost. To make it work, a part of me had to die. It was the proud, stubborn part of me that clung to those late-night hours like a birthright. The part that felt entitled to a reward of mindless escape after a hard day’s work. Admitting that this “reward” was actually a self-inflicted poison felt like a surrender. It felt like losing.
So the guy who said, “I’ve earned this.” The guy who needed to feel like he owned part of the day, even if it meant ruining the next one. That guy had to go.
And with him went a few parts of my routine. I stopped going to the gym at 7:30 p.m., which always led to 10 p.m. dinners and an overstuffed body too wired to sleep. I started shifting things earlier — gym right after work, earlier meals, less chaos after sundown. I introduced quiet time with my family. We shut the screens off earlier. My wife, my son, and I would sit together and read for a while. Just that change slowed the entire evening down. My son was calmer going to bed. I was calmer not needing to decompress. We were all just more still.
These weren’t grand, dramatic changes. They were small, structural shifts. But they were everything. They created an environment where going to bed at 10 or 10:30 p.m. felt like the most natural thing in the world.
Trading Junk Hours for Productive Ones
At first, it felt like I was giving something up. But here’s the thing I didn’t expect: once I got into the rhythm, I didn’t miss it. The videos, the junk content — they just disappeared from my life. I didn’t crave them, because I never really wanted them. I’d just built a life where they showed up every night by default. Once I took control of the default, the need vanished. Now, I still watch YouTube — but intentionally, maybe on a weekend, maybe while eating lunch, and always with a purpose. Not to escape.
I haven’t abandoned YouTube entirely, but my relationship with it has changed. I now use it with intention, to watch something specific or learn something new, often while eating lunch on a weekend. It is no longer the default state for a tired mind.
In the end, it felt less like a sacrifice and more like a quiet bargain. I traded hours of low-quality, guilt-ridden inertia for hours of high-quality, sacred solitude. I gave up the illusion of rest for the reality of it.
The price of waking up early isn’t paid in the morning, gritting your teeth as you force yourself out of bed. It’s paid the night before, in the quiet, deliberate decision to surrender the time you think you deserve for the time you truly need. It’s the choice to gently close the door on the day, not in defeat, but in preparation for the clarity that only the dawn can bring. And that is a bargain worth making every single time.
